My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
Uhm, zero? With ten years of using Linux? What did you do to fuck up the damn kernel? o_O
It can be done if you mess with the initramfs.
The kernel starts everything else by unpacking an archive containing a minimal environment to set stuff up for later. Such as loading needed kernel modules, decrypting your drive, etc. It then launches, by default, the /init program (mines a shell script).
That program is PID 1. If it dies, your kernel will panic.
After it finishes setup, it execs your actual /sbin/init. These means it dies, and that program (systemd, openrc, dinit, runit, etc) becomes PID 1. If an issue happens, both could fail to execute and the kernel will loop forever.
Thank you for explanation :) I suspected something like that - mess up with some internals, you do have a chance to bring the thing down. Which is why I always have a bootable usb around before doing anything risky
It’s even better if your only internet connection is that computer you broke.
Great incentive to learn even faster
And enforces the value of installing documentation and source packages 😅
This is the nightmare of my last 2 weeks. Well 11 days.
It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.
We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.
So this is why I’m bad at drawing. I have 954 more drawings to go!
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually killed a system, I’ve booted from UEFI shell manually just to recover systems. Back when I was using arch id just chroot into the system from a flash drive and fix whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn’t get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?
I think I’m past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I’ve never had to use it.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.
👍 never had to start over
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Gang. The only distro I haven’t been able to break after 6 months (well, I have, but I’ve been able to snapper rollback every time)
It’s the first rolling distro I have tried, and I’ve been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It’s surprisingly solid, and everything’s up to date.
Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it’s up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don’t intrude, and they are fast.
It seems to hit that right balance of bleeding edge while SUSE are still testing the packages for a bit to ensure there aren’t bad updates. Fedora sounds interesting to me as well, but I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.
I wanted to give OpenSuse Tumbleweed a go yesterday, but the live USB got stuck at “Loading basic drivers” so I couldn’t even get to being able to install it.
I tried to use dd with too much hubris once. I had to restore from backups (which ironically, I had made with dd). I’m usually overly cautious, but I was in a hurry.
I did this one a few weeks ago lmao. You think once would be enough. But I am a truly special being.
No no no! When you break something in Linux systems you fix it. Starting over and reinstalling everything is what you do when you mess up on Windows.
Funny I did not expect so many people that resist starting over. Next time I’ll give fixing stuff a shot :)
It is more about being lazy.
In most cases, where you havn’t destroyed your filesystem, you can just boot another Linux from a USB stick, mount your filesystems to /mnt, chroot into it, and then investigate and fix there.
See the Archlinux wiki, even if you do not use Archlinux, it is great: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
Recently I accidently deleted the contents of /boot/ on my first arch install. The lesson that followed was something I would have rather saved for later ^^
Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation… And couldn’t figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.
Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.
I haven’t majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao
Maybe 1 or 2 back when things were less stable, but any time I have used Linux in the past 7 years or so, and particularly since I started using Debian as my primary OS, I haven’t had any problems outside of trying to get some windows applications to emulate correctly, and one time when I echo’d into sources.list with > instead of >>. Anything else is just stuff I had to learn, like my boot folder filling up with old images that have to be cleaned out occasionally.
If you want shit to just work when you want and stay out the way when you aren’t using it. Debian of whatever source is what they call stability. I’ve done rolling, and bleeding edge. It’s all a constant pain. Becomes a job to maintain or bug track or check logs. I’ll never go back.
That was my thought as well.
Back when I was new to Linux, I tried a lot of different distros in virtualization for shorter periods of time, and of course ran into the issues that come with the cutting edge stuff.
Last year I wanted to install a distribution to my laptop properly as a test before putting it onto my desktop, and I came to that same conclusion because at the end of the day I couldn’t justify using bleeding edge, because I couldn’t really even name anything I NEEDED from it. Yes, it is fun to have cool, new things, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with in a VM or something, but I don’t actually need any of that stuff for what I do on a computer day to day right this second.
After that, the answer was pretty clear for me as to what distribution to use.
Both, to the point it doesn’t boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it’s easier to jist start over.
I remember managing to install two DE one above the other, and having them, somehow working at the exact same time. That was trippy.
I didn’t even know how I did it. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t replicate that on purpose.
… So what should I try Linux again?
You mean why? Because you’re using your bare machine, you can use it as you wish. No nanny software limiting the fun or productivity
Yeah but breaking like six computers to do it, or one computer six times, seems like a pretty steep price for that when I basically just use my computer for gaming browsing and the occasional audio/video edit.
OP said breaking the kernel, not the machine. The computers would be fine, its pretty damn difficult to brick a computer using software, at least by accident.
Normal users will not break their kernel, op is likely doing some advanced tinkering. I have been using Linux for years and am definitely an advanced user and Ive broken my kernel zero times.
Gotcha, that’s reassuring
