High School friend showed me their install, and how it had these sick spinning cube desktop. Ditched it once I realized I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
In University, the ComSci labs all had networked machines with Ubuntu installed. It was cool, but again outside of coding, I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
2022, I got a new Laptop, couldn’t use Windows 11 without an account (I know of the work arounds). MS has Windows 10 with a EOL in 2025, and Valve is pushing the Steam Deck hard. Gave it a second shot. I now can do everything I want on it without issue. I even made a 1 year retrospective video about it.
My dad gave me a laptop running ubuntu as my first computer many years ago and I have never found any non-linux operating system I really liked. There are some things I love about Haiku, but it just isn’t quite good enough to replace Linux for me, at least not yet
Until a couple of weeks ago I used Fedora Silverblue.
Then, after mostly using GNOME Shell for about a decade, I (reluctantly) tried KDE Plasma 5.27 on my desktop due to its support for variable refresh rate and since then I have fallen in love with KDE Plasma for the first time (retrospectively I couldn’t stand it from version 4 until around 5.20).
Now I am using Fedora 39 Kinoite on two of my three devices and Fedora 39 KDE on a 2-in-1 laptop that requires custom DKMS modules (not possible on atomic Fedora spins) for the speakers.
Personally I try to use containers (Flatpaks on the desktop and OCI images on my homeserver) whenever possible. I love that I can easily restrict or expand permissions (e. g. I have a global nosocket=x11 override) and that my documentation is valid with most distributions, since Flatpak always behaves the same.
I like using Fedora, since it isn’t a rolling release, but its software is still up-to-date and it has always (first version I used is Fedora 15) given me a clean, stable and relatively bug-free experience.
In my opinion Ubuntu actually has the perfect release cycle, but Canonical lost me with their flawed-by-design snap packages and their new installers with incredibly limited manual partitioning options (encryption without LVM, etc.).
After having used Ubuntu LTS for 6 years, I find a little more peace with Debian. I do not like systems that break. Debian Stable is IMPOSSIBLY HARD to break, even more than Ubuntu LTS, which only broke once because of my stupidity of installing ProtonVPN client and using VPN killswitch through it. Switched to using OpenVPN/Wireguard config files.
Debian doesn’t break often because they don’t change things just for the sake of changing them. Nice and stable. Even if you do break something, a guide published 5 years ago describing how to solve the problem would probably still mostly work today.
First step is to back up whatever data is there. Boot into a rescue distro like GRMLdd the block device to an external hard drive.
If you nuked the partition table, there may be additional work to rebuild it if you used GPT rather than MBR. But gdisk should also tell you if there are backups, which would make your life way easier.
If you still have a partition (like /dev/sda1) but the mount command claims that it cannot find a valid ext signature, you might be able to simply use mkfs.ext4. It’s counterintuitive, but this isn’t destructive and will recreate the filesystem leaving the data alone. And if it does turn out to be destructive, that’s why you have your backup.
To recover from the backup, you can use scalpel or photorec from the testdisk package. Photorec holds your hand and can be run in read-only mode. Caveat: These tools work by looking for specific file headers and makes a best guess as to where it’ll end (if the format doesn’t have a defined footer).
In the car now, but I can respond with more detailed steps if your other options don’t pan out.
It is the same as with all logins: It goes through the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So you need a service that uses PAM (they basically all do for a long time now) and the configuration of that service needs to include homed as an option to authenticate users. Check /etc/pam.d for the config files.
Stopped evangelising when I realised people hate evangelists telling them what they should do. Started leading by example instead. Curious people approach you if they want to learn.
I ended up replacing windows with Ubuntu. I liked it a lot but I couldn’t use it because I needed to use FL Studio on windows. I started dual booting Linux with windows to get a sense of the terminal. I’m not the most experienced user but I figured out how to get around and I enjoy using Linux. I have tried Arch, Nix, EndeavorOS, ArcoLinux, Manjaro, and Ubuntu Unity. I want to try OpenSUSE since I’ve been reading up on it and it seems to be my end game distro imo.
I tried the plasma 6 alpha and although it’s still a bit rough around the edges this should be a marvelous release given the time they still have to fix all the bugs.
I was very curious about computing and trying different applications
I liked customizing and tinkering with my setup: Launcher, window manager, icons, etc.
I was a poor teenager
On the windows side, there were neat apps like Stardock Windowblinds, for the most part, everything was paid and expensive for someone with no disposable income.
Mind was blown when I realized everything I wanted was available for free! My first install was actually from a CD that came with a book I checked out from the public library
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