My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
The “starting over” part is what made it take so long for linux to “stick” with me.
Once it became “restore from an earlier image”, it was a game changer!
I could be weird for this but the starting over part actually contributed to me continuing to use linux tbh. Trying out a new distro, figuring out how to use it, and building a new user interface each time I killed my system kept me engaged with linux beyond its utility. It functioned essentially as a way to learn about computers and as a creative outlet. I don’t fuck around and find out as much as I used to but I still swap distro every year or so.
It was similar for me, but not quite the same. The thing I hated was starting from scratch. I’m very much not a distro hopper. Back in the day, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to troubleshoot issues and get the system working again, and that kept me interested, but eventually, I’d hit a problem I couldn’t resolve, and I’d have to start again from scratch, and at that point, I’d just go back to Windows.
Now, I still get to do the same thing. If I break it, I get to learn how I broke it and try and fix it, and I find that process compelling. But because I’m using btrfs restore points now, I don’t get to the point where I have to start again from scratch. So I can work at solving it to the limit of my abilities, with confidence that if I can’t work it out, it’s not a huge issue.
My game changer was circa 2014 when I broke something and got dropped to a basic shell and for the first time instead of panicking and immediately reinstalling I thought for a moment about what I had just done to break it, and undid the change manually. Wouldn’t you know it booted right up like normal.
The lesson here: if it broke, you probably broke it, and if you know how you broke it, you know how to fix it.
“Starting over” is how we learnt Windows in the 90’s too
I’d just re-install Windows over the top of the fucked up install normally. It was a bit easier to recover from, and a bit harder to fuck up
Giving our computer ghonorrea by downloading Napster mp3s
