boot: "you are in emergency mode"

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.

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

If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<

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.

Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?

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 user beginner 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.

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.

This is true for any OS. If it's not working you can't use it to look up how to fix it. That's not unique to Linux.

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.

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.

Commonly referred to as a "smartphone"

A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough

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've been using linux since last December and I haven't majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?

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 what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can't switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It's rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I'm sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.

As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.

Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy

Amateurs. I can search for fixes while my computer is still broken!

(ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, etc to switch to TTY, then lynx ddg.gg to get to DuckDuckGo)

I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.

I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.

Ive never had that happen on linux.

On windows though, it was once a year. And it wasn't even anything I did half the time. When are we going to stop pretending windows doesn't ask more if you to have it working properly?

openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.

I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.

Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P

learning that most people didn't have a "back up computer" was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT

what? windows breaks and you need second screen... but grub never fails you. the meme is closed source propaganda.

To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.

I remember these tough times. Doing all kinds of shit as a kid and the resolution was just to nuke it all and start anew.

This doesn’t happen on Nixos thanks to rollbacks ! (I guess unless your computer has never been in a working state at all, or if you erase the disk)

Just use Tumbleweed or Fedora...or any other distro with amazing brtfs support.

That alone has saved me from myself more times than I want to mention.

Can't relate, I do not use Arch.

This was true for Windows as well.

Lmao. I thought I was the only one. I have like 5 USB sticks with 5 different distros on them all tested and working. I also have a laptop with bazziteOS so the chance of it breaking to no return is very slim. That way, I can fix my desktop if it breaks.

Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?

I always have at least one partially built computer xD

A phone is often sufficient for googeling, but if you have ssh it's nice with a secondary computer. Recovered from crashes where no input works so many times.

One does not simply Linux without having a stable backup computer. 👌

Nah now you just switch to a TTY with a bunch of sick Rust terminal tools, or if its really borked you boot into recovery mode and mount the old filesystem and do magic spells at the filesystem until it works.

Multiple backup computers. In fact I'm a bit peeved my oldest backup computer broke.

The existing computer can serve as the "second" if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven't borked the hardware).

Yes, it's a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it's all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.

In related news: When did you last make a backup?

grub rescue>

Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD

That's true, but it actually feels worse than it is because if it was Windows you couldn't fix it anyway, so you still needed a second computer so that you could keep doing whatever you do on your computers in your life.

Until you need a third running an entirely different distribution or OS

I had two laptops both set up very similarly, both Thinkpads on LMDE and running Tailscale.

Something broke my network setup on both of these laptops within the same day and it turned out to be Tailscale DNS conflicting with some other Linux network service, but I only learned that after using my phone to look online

Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.

It is definitely the case that I've had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I've also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn't an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).

It's funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren't so crippled. Similarly, you weren't so crippled if you couldn't use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.

These days, it's pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube -- obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat -- same problem.

Happened to my wife yesterday. Some update broke grub.

Or you can use nixos and boot into the last working configuration (assuming your bootloader is working)

I've seriously considered installing a small rescue system on all my devices.

So true. I went to my live cd many times

Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.

I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.

This has been my experience, yes.

I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.

I got my new computer three years ago, but I still use the old one with Mint 18 on it for some stuff, and the Eee is in the drawer.

Make a habit to use timeshift or similar backup utility if you continue "exercising your skills". Those allow you to roll back to last known good config.

Having a separate emergency windows ssd fixed that concern for me

My second computer broke ;.;

i have a whiteboard where i wrote steps to fix common issuee with gentoo

Ctrl shift 2 + links2 still works for me most of the time..