I’ve had the typical disasters with partition tables and boot loader mixups, but the one I keep coming back to is updating my Nvidia drivers too eagerly. Whether something gets messed up with an external monitor, or the laptop starts resisting switching away from the integrated GPU, or an electron app I use regularly that makes heavy use of 3D acceleration breaks, or I just need to bump the driver version in a reproducible system state record… it’s just bad news.
@fl42v I have thousands from my early days, but my only recent-ish one was pretty funny.
On an Arch install that hadn't been updated for a while, in a rush, had an app that needed OpenSSL 3. Instead of updating the whole system, I just updated the openssl package.
Everything broke immediately. Turns out a lot of stuff depends on openssl. Who knew?
To fix, booted to the arch installer, chrooted into my env, and reverted to the previous version of the package — then updated properly.
I was trying to extract some files from a a Linux image of one of those ARM boards. It was packed into the cpio format, and I had never used the format before. Of course I was trying to extract to a root owned directory and I sudo’ed it. I effed up the command and overwrote all my system directories (/bin, /usr, /lib, etc…). Thankfully I had backed up my system recently and was able to get it working again.
Probably PoP_OS!. There isn’t anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn’t. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.
I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I’ve seen (it’s like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.
The first time I installed Fedora after like a decade I updated to new minor version -> sudo reboot because I was already in the terminal -> reinstalled because it wouldn’t boot anymore
I copied a program into the /bin/ folder while in a file browser with sudo permissions and somehow overwrote every file except the one I was moving. It, of course, couldn’t boot, but copying the bins from a live iso made it at least boot able. Reinstalled Linux after that, of course.
Where my curiosity lies is this, from my understanding Linux Mint is based on underlying Ubuntu as is Pop_OS, so how come both Pop_OS and Ubuntu recognise the wi-fi card out of the box so to speak but Mint doesn’t.
Different releases of Linux distributions come with different kernel versions (e.g. 4.x vs 5.x vs 6.x). And in the past sometimes for some devices (Like Android smart phones for mtp file transfer, or security keys) additional udev rules had to be added to make the Linux system recognize the device properly. Then there is firmware (closed source binary blobs) as well.
I remember a friend having issues with the WiFi card, with an old LTS version of Ubuntu, whereas a brand new Ubuntu version worked fine with the WiFi card. Glad to hear it all works for you, and welcome on board @ Planet Linux.
Once I succumbed to a proprietary software’s allure, post-usage, I felt like a digital pariah! To rid myself of the taint, I wiped my system clean – reinstall time!
On OpenSUSE, in Yast bootloader tool, there is a checkbox to to do something like locking the bootloader (it has been a while, I don’t remember the exact thingy). Rebooted and oh, surprise, the bootloader was locked… Which mean Grub didn’t load.
Years ago I was dual-booting with Ubuntu just to try out whatever this Linux thing was that all the nerds were talking about. Liked it and played around with it, but for whatever reason I wanted to go back to just Windows, I needed the space I had partitioned off or something, can’t remember why. So I just uninstalled or deleted the bootloader somehow (maybe I just deleted the Linux partition and expected the space to clear up like normal).
Go to restart the computer… oh shit. Ohshotohshitohshitohshit.
At one point I had the coolest Ventoy USB; CyberRe, LABEL=hakr. But then I got a new computer and apparently the ssd was /dev/nvme0n1 instead of /dev/sda. While I was installing Arch, When I created a new GPT partition on /dev/sda, it wiped my beautiful Ventoy 😢
I thoroughly backup up my slow nvme before installing a new faster one. I actually didn’t even want to reuse the installation, just the files at /home.
So I mounted it at /mnt/backupnvme0n1, 2, etc and rsynced
The first few dry runs showed a lot of data was redundant, so I geniously thought “wow I should delete some of these”. And that’s when I did a classic sudo rm -rf in the /mnt root folder instead of /mnt/dirthathadthoseredundantfiles
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