Somehow the EFI partition doesn’t mount and it’s impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    471·
    6 months ago

    I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.

    Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he’d bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that’s what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.

    Since then, he’s called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.

    Dad’s in his 80’s and was a cop with an associate’s degree; he’s never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that’s OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I’m stupidly loyal to Arch.

    I’m sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that’s super frustrating.

  • nrab@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    37·
    6 months ago

    If the EFI partition truly was at fault, you wouldn’t get into Linux. And if the issue is mounting the efi partition after booting, that shouldn’t be a critical error. So it sounds like something else is at fault IMO

  • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
    31·
    6 months ago

    I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

    Linux has problems, but I’m so glad I don’t have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he’d consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

    He didn’t even know about onedrive, just phoned me like “The Internet isn’t working, what’s wrong?” and of course onedrive is the last thing I’d have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

    Much nicer now his OS doesn’t do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.

      • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
        8·
        6 months ago

        Hehe, you might think that!

        In actuality though, I’ve always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.

        So yeah, I’ve always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    171·
    6 months ago

    Great example of why a safety net is required.

    Yes hopefully the “base” setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings… but what happens when it break?

    Windows (despite all the criticism, and I’m one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).

    So… you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it… then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.

    While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.

    IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she’ll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    6 months ago

    That happens when I select the wrong kernel in the systemd boot menu, before that screen. Doing nothing after an upgrade also selects the wrong version by default, it’s kinda annoying. I have to select the most up to date version and press Ctrl-D to make it the default on the next boot.

    If that’s also what happens here, maybe a solution could be to keep only one kernel version and its fallback. But idk if you’re using systemd-boot or grub

  • Tehhund@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3018·
    6 months ago

    Loool, all the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot are 1) probably correct and 2) completely missing the point. I have a Windows desktop, a Mac, and a Linux desktop at home and this kind of shit only happens on Linux these days.

    • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      How am I the only one who does have annoying issues like this on Windows (except that Windows only gives a useless error code at most) while Linux has failed to boot a total of once (without me explicitly changing nvidia drivers).

      • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        51·
        6 months ago

        System breaking errors that doesn’t allow you to even login?

        Windows have lots of issues, but it’s been a while since I found those system breaking issues to be somehow common.

        For all their shit, credit myst be given when credit is due. And windows it’s become a really robust systems against layer 8 issues. Even powering off middle update is kind of easy to recover (I have to solve this issue for a user recently).

        • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          I’ve only had it quite that bad once when I just rebooted and it decided to pull an update. After that the bios was unable to find any of the bootloaders on my system. (Fixed with a lot fiddling from a liveusb. Is a dual boot system but I haven’t touched Windows on it since 2023)

          These other ones just made it unusable. Another time on a laptop it pulled updates in the background and would crash itself just after login. (Needed to be reinstalled and I lost some data which wasn’t backed up yet. setup by manufacturer)

          Then on a different desktop system it just would bsod every few minutes, barely leaving time to go through logs. (I finally fixed it by changing a BIOS setting and reinstalling Windows, setup by manufacturer installed Linux on a separate drive and it was fine until the drive malfunctioned)

          This was not a crash, just a thirty minute delay. A couple of days ago that device did an update without me even logging in. I accidentally started windows, then immediately selected reboot in the power menu before entering a password. It then ‘prepared’ something and told me not to reboot, bypassed grub, rebooted again, bypassed grub (after I missed the bios), rebooted again back into grub.

    • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
      102·
      6 months ago

      You’re right, this never happens on windows. It’s so robust no one ever complains

      /s

    • iopq@lemmy.world
      81·
      6 months ago

      Literally happened updating just yesterday so I went to an older boot entry. The Matrix channel blamed my hardware, but the older revision boots just fine

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        3·
        6 months ago

        Right but you see it never happened to that person so it means it’s like that for everybody else. Clearly you are wrong. /s

    • projectsquared@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      My MacBook is getting very long in the tooth and the updates via OCLP are working in creating a system that is painfully slow to use. I’ve been tinkering with various Linux distros for 20 years and the thought of having one as my only daily driver does not sound appealing. I really don’t want to drop the money on a new laptop but I need something to work without constantly troubleshooting.

  • Alas Poor Erinaceus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    Really out of my depth here, but anyway—

    What model computer does your mom have? Does it by any chance have solid state drives that are RAID 0?

    Have you tried Linux Mint? After really struggling with Fedora, I was able to get Mint up and running after a few minimal problems and haven’t looked back since.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    6 months ago

    At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook

  • Ardens@lemmy.ml
    7·
    6 months ago

    It’s good your mom tried. It’s sad she gave up so soon. I’ve helped 4 people switch in the past months. I’ve gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. :-)

    • Moonrise2473@lemmy.mlOP
      32·
      6 months ago

      Seems like only the EFI partition is missing. She told me “ls /home/her name” shows stuff but “ls /boot/efi” is empty

      Apparently this happened by itself

      I should have chosen something like silverblue but I wasn’t familiar with that