In the era of ‘smart’ phones most people have what they need, other than the equivalent of a Windows installation cd (as others have said probably on a bootable usb these days).
But I think all of the
userbeginner friendly distributions have a gui settings and package manager that isn’t inherently more difficult than windows straight out of the box (and is probably more straightforward). Macs are presumably marginally more stable due to the consistent hardware, but I have only ever had an issue with quite esoteric wifi and graphics cards, and not for a long time.It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it’s a conf file for Xorg… but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn’t, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Mode=50; RefreshRate= 50 Hz Mode=51; RefreshRate= 59.9999999 Hz Mode=52; RefreshRate= 60.0 Hz DefaultMode=51 FallbackMode=50Thanks Xorg.conf
Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me…
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure…Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.
Links2 saved my ass a couple times switching to Linux this last year, still a staple when you prefer reading on a real screen.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
I’ve been there. I’m 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit “Enter”
And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
REISUB
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I’d have a nickel.
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn’t working or ssh’ing into my machine when the video output doesn’t work
Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures
Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I’ve broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it’s not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you’re remotely comfortable with the command line it’s pretty trivial to get it booting again.
Had my server set up with encrypted drives and getting the root key from a flash drive. Cloned a drive and replaced the old one, somehow it was crypttab that just stopped working with me. Took like 4 hours solid to get it actually back up.
Lol I just had an fstab issue today where my computer wouldn’t boot
Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
It’s been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved…
Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
Correct. But usually it’s spelled anecdotal.
Literally every time I touch fstab. I’ve also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
Forgetting to put the correct keys for secure boot.
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it’s not too hard to restore but still.
My NAS is one place where I wouldn’t risk anything that isn’t rock solid. Even if you don’t lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
I was dual booting, distro hopping to figure out what I liked & didn’t like. After a few installs, I got cocky and thought I had the hang of things, and instead somehow deleted the bootloader, or something like that. Couldn’t boot up at all to any OS.
Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.
Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.
I learned about the “nofail” option the hard way when setting up a headless server and typing the address of my NAS wrong.
That’s what makes Linux so much fun.
This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.
I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I’d say don’t laugh but I still do.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
With linux: all you need is a bootable usb stick. With windows: all you need is a bootable usb stick and a free weekend.
To be honest, you need that weekend with Linux too but it’s fun instead of dread, and you get to set it up in a whole new way
I don’t know, i haven’t needed to debloat or spend hours finding correct drivers and configuring things so my tablet and dac work and still have to manually start the drivers and restart the dac since its driver crashed every hibernate on windows 11.
On linux only setup i needed to do is security certs ro sftp into my uni ftp server and pop in some data into config folder.
And the fix is understandable. The number of times I’ve had to fuck with Windows and never quite understood what I did that made it work, because you couldn’t repeat it twice. Sometimes it was just the number of reboots you needed to do for it to uncross the turd caught sideways and suddenly work fine, until it didn’t…
And a second weekend to actually make a working bootable Windows USB.
You can make a bootable windows USB in like 15 minutes using the media creation tool.
Way better than the old days of copying ISOs and muckong about with creating partitions on a thumb drive.
You’re underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there…
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn’t threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
I always talk nicely to my computers. They’re trying their best, and sometimes I have to accept their best isn’t what I hoped for today.
The
dualitybinary of manYeah, that’s when the threat of violence come in handy.
Bricked a laptop by trying to flash Coreboot onto it and forgetting to put my original BIOS in the build…
I had a spare parts laptop and reused the motherboard but still, big oopsies on my part.
Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.
I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.
In 2010 it was the smartphone? Not the dozen older computers, misc laptops, or even maybe a tablet lying around?
The sharp zaurus sl5500 with full color and useful in daylight screen was all the way back in 2004 for example.
Or the Asus Eepc in 2007 and it came with Linux!
I would have thought everyone would have access to a cheap fallback computer by then.
Yeah I’m assuming they didn’t have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible
Yeah. It just is really surprising the phone came first that late in computer history
I can’t tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn’t exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.
Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would’ve been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.
I could’ve asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would’ve been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.
And so it’s not that I think it’s weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It’s that I think it’s weird to not understand that not everyone else did.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something… anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn’t you, thats cool.
taking a shot at installing a new OS
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
I think you might be forgetting just how much e-waste was going on leading up to 2010. All the way back in 2003 I was using recycled computers for my Linux servers. Windows XP came out in 2001 and by about 2005 the number of Win98 machines being dumped was pretty high.
So I looked it up using the way back machine. I saw a flyer for my local computer store. You could buy a basic but complete computer NEW for under $200 in 2010. You also could spend thousands of course but you didn’t have to. You could get a netbook new for $150.
So I went to some liquidation and used computer sites and old newspapers in 2010. A dell optiplex p4 at 2.4 ghz complete with 90 days warranty: $60. And it seems used is about $50 to $100 in general. Laptops a slight premium. And those are the ones people tried to get money back from. Lots of them were just FREE. The number of garage sale listings in the newspapers offering free computers is crazy.
And I mention all of that because Linux was how you took an old win 98 machine and turned it into a functioning web host, or email server, or NAS, or whatever back in those days.
And by the way, I think I paid $25 for my sharp zaurus used in 2005. It was so cool to have an internet handheld with color that you could use in full sunlight and ran linux.
Edit: I hope you see this! If you lived in Fayette county (GA) in 2010, you could get a Dell Optiplex GX280 P4 at 2.8 ghz complete computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard for $65, with free shipping. That should tell you something right there.
To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren’t counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol
I’ll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren’t actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn’t know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Also,
Windows is a mature, established OS, it is perfectly capable of breaking on it’s own without the user’s input
Look what kind of OS would not just break by siiting their without imput
Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
I have multiple lying around, because I’m also very forgetful. And also not only for emergencies, but mainly for maintenance, eg. editing/moving partitions.
It’s definitely something you should have lying around for exactly this kind of contingency. That goes for Windows too, btw. Windows installations also get borked and having a Linux live system available can be a life saver.
I’ve managed MSP services and this is hog wash. In 6 years of providing Linux, Windows, and OSX I can’t recall a single instance of windows bricking itself without kernel level software running in the background. And those instances are partition errors done outside of windows land.
You have to be trying to brick Windows these days to get to an unbootable state.
I on the other hand have multiple team members running random distos fuck up video drivers to the point where we had to wipe everything clean. And Linux computers were given out at a rate of like 1 for every 20 mac or osx machine.
So sure you could carry this around at all times but it’s not going to be helpful for 99% of users in reality.
My windows 11 bricked itself before i even got to the end of the setup process lmao
👌👍
So there haven’t been any problems with Windows updates recently? I’m happy things are running well in your particular shop. But that’s not the regular experience of every business let alone home user.
So what, we’re just making shit up now? Windows computers bricking themselves in secret? Business across the planet dealing with Windows breaking on updates? What subset of home users are you claiming have issues with windows looking itself on update?
Not this vague bullshit.
There have definitively been multiple times windows systems bricked themselves on me without it being my fault
It’s not rarer than Linux systems bricking in my experience. In addition, Linux systems tend to be a lot more fixable, but with windows being just a black box sometimes you’re just shit out of luck and have to reinstall
👌👍 I guess the rando non technical users we support all day have more tech skills than you 🤷♂️
2025 and still having these arguments about the cons of Linux desktop. The only real reason it’s as good as it is, is valve pumping money into it.
That’s a big assumption about who I am, what I do, and my abilities, isn’t it?
You don’t know everything, and your experiences aren’t universal, you know
I have a half dozen of them setup. Any external drive that I use for copying files first gets built with Ventoy and some images.
Nahh. Just use a live boot of the distro of your choice.
Only Arch doesn’t make sense though. Livebooting Debian KDE for Gparted is easier than working with fdisk etc. to eg. move a partition.
Depends on how you break it. Broken partitions? Sure, Gparted it is. Everything else? Most often can be fixed with a quick
arch-chrootand then undoing whatever caused the mess.So yeah, I agree with the Ventoy suggestion. Such a neat little tool that it’s earned it’s place on my key-chain.
It really depends. I like using live boot arch since it just gets me into a shell that I can chroot with really fast and I don’t have to worry about any graphical elements coming into play. Of course if it is something like a laptop then that is a totally different story.
Generally though I keep luks encrypted usb drive with a full install with most everything you would need for those situations complete with a fully set up and remote managed environment over tailscale so I can keep my preferences up to date and even remote in from another device of my choice. It makes the whole recovery process suck a whoooole lot less.
Can’t praise ventoy enough. Brilliant little piece of kit.
My only issue with this is, I think I have had very low quality USB sticks that get corrupted putting Ventoy on them tbh.
Same. Though I moved to a 30€ 256GB USB-A + USB-C stick, which is more than enough for my ISOs and very quick to write on. And I hope it withstands a lot of write cycles too.
I unironically keep a tiny linux mint boot usb key on my keychain.
When I feel bad about myself, I remember that I have that on my keychain, and I think I can’t be that much of a failure because that’s pretty cool.
Hey, I’m impressed
Id do the same thing! I JB welded a USB stick on my conceal carry so when I screw up my boot loader I can sigh and whip out my gun and put it in my computer.
Unrelated, I’m banned from public libraries statewide.
Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.
Commonly referred to as a “smartphone”
Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
Did your bootloader ever fail you? Now how do you debug that?
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin
Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.
That’s not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.
Does Hiren’s BootCD PE count?
No. You have a barely functioning windows environment when using hirens that’s only useful for very specific things. Linux can boot off a flash drive and do literally anything a full install can do.
a barely functioning windows environment…that’s only useful for very specific things.
Sounds like a full Windows install to me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can boot windows of an usb stick. You can create that with rufus. I tried it out of curiosity and it actually works.
deleted by creator
You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.
Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody’s installing MacOS anyway.
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC… then someone replied “wait wouldn’t just running the ‘install VLC’ command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?”
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.
Phew, so I’m not alone? 😂
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won’t work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn’t run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn’t run on many laptops – I don’t know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn’t work, and it couldn’t sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can’t remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn’t sleep >_>
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn’t ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
You’re certainly doing Linux! I’ve only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)
I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn’t too bad.
