My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
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!
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!
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.
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.
“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
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
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.
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
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)_/¯
And not somehow break it more from there? Impressive!
This is the way!
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.
I would actually be amazed if I ever bricked a PC fucking around with installing software to it. At the very worst, I might have to move a jumper pin to flash the CMOS and start fresh like I never even touched the thing. If somehow even that fails, it would be a unique experience.
Not sure you can fully brick a PC. Simple BIOS update and your back to scratch load an OS and go again. Hardware failure. That’s where the bricking happens.
I’ve been running different versions of Linux since 2011. My crippled kernel count is still zero to this day.
And that’s even after stripping it of the drivers I’ll never need, stripping it of the languages I’ll never need, and even rerouting all temporary files, internet cache, and even core OS log files to tmpfs and ramfs.
Yeah, try troubleshooting an OS with no log files after reboot. Yeah, I can do that, hella performance boost!
Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again
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 ^^
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.
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
I haven’t had any issues with the kernel yet. The worst thing that I can remember doing is messing up the systemd boot entry on my Arch Linux install.
I’ve never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.
