linuxmemes

I managed a CentOS system where someone accidentally deleted everything from /usr, so no lib64, and no bin. I didn't have a way to get proper files at the time, so I hooked the drive up to my Arch system, made sure glibc matched, and copied yum and other tools from Arch.

Booted the system, reinstalled a whole lot of yum packages, and... the thing still worked.

That's almost equivalent to a reinstall, though. As a broke college student, I had a laptop with a loose drive, that would fall out very easily. I set it up to load a few crucial things into a ramdisk at boot, so that I could browse the web and take notes even if the drive was disconnected, and it would still load images and things. I could pull the cover off and push the drive back in place to save files, but doing that every time I had class got really tiring, so I wanted it to run a little like a live system.

Some of the crap I had to do back in the late 00s to get wifi, sleep and power management even barely working on some machines felt like the hardest thing at the time. I wonder how I’d fare with those issues today, 17 years later, knowing quite a bit more about the underlying OS and working with the OS daily… I don’t know that I’d qualify that as difficult more than it was extremely tedious and a bunch of trial and error of configuration options I didn’t know anything about.

If we’re talking about modern day… not so much honestly. btrfs snapshots saved my ass a couple of times, the rare issue I encounter I just rollback and wait for an upstream fix, and the rest I typically ignore or use something else. Everything tends to run quite smooth for me as a general rule, though.

Jumping from the default kernel with zfs to the xanmod kernel using a manually compiled version of zfs. I don't rememeber a whole lot but it was quite... interesting. Next would be a suddenly vanished efi partition and my f* mainboard refusing to boot ZBM.

Bonus: my currently still unfixed problem is a very weird freezing/stuttering of the whole OS and the only (useless) "lead" I have is workqueue: fill_page_cache_func hogged CPU for >10000us 4 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND

I don't know how I fixed it, but KDE Plasma 5.whatever on MX was acting up. It would let me login but if I couldn't do much else. Wouldn't respond to my clicks or anything. Thankfully I could open Yakuake and install a different desktop environment. Then, one day while I was backing up files to do a reinstall, it started working again. I could use Plasma without issues. I have no clue what fixed it, though.

It also came with a non-issue of now my laptop won't auto turn on every time I open it up, but I'll take that over having to reinstall and set things back up.

Fast data transmission via TCP over a lossy link.

Rescuing home partition from ZFS, actually that doesn't really count since I did have to reinstall (was no longer booting), but recovering the Home partition from ZFS and to the other ext4 drive was much harder than it should've been and that's why I would never recommend people use ZFS.