Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?

I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.

For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.

It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.

So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.

See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.

EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…

Auli,

Expecting things to be different.

DidacticDumbass,

The differences do seem enormous when one first encounters linux. They shrink every install though, but it takes some time for the magic to wear off.

Pantherina,

Installing GNOME on Kubuntu I think, hahaaha.

UxyIVrljPeRl,

Installed Manjaro sway and now i want back to xfce, but i really dont want to reinstall again…

DidacticDumbass,

DEs get so wonky if you try to change them. I wish it was easier to compartmentalize an envirionment.

Pantherina,

Its possible using homedir backup etc. Or on Fedora Atomic simply switching desktops. But yeah Desktops are all over the place, having a ~/.kde folder where EVERYTHING is stored would be great.

bitwolf,

Ahem

~/.config/kde

FTFY 🙂

interceder270,

Thank you.

DidacticDumbass,

Oh, I am on Fedora Silverblue with Gnome. If it is easy to switch, I think I will give KDE a try!

I like Gnome, and I definitely need to tweak some behavior I find annoying, but I feel I never gave KDE a proper chance because I seem to mess up the panel whenever I look at it wrong, and have no idea how to get back to default.

Pantherina,

Yeeah that panel. The only problem is opening the start menu with “super” though. You can always add a “default” panel.

Maybe do it like this: create a keyboard shortcut ctrl+alt+t for konsole, whyever it is not default. Then remove all panels and run qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer 0 0 1 (alias that to “logout” in your .bashrc, its a horrible command).

Then remove all panels and logout. Log back in, add a default panel and maybe you are already good. Maybe log out again. The only default panel normally always gets the correct start menu. Its a bit messed up.

To switch between silverblue and kinoite you can just rebase, but make sure to backup all your “dotfiles” (the hidden configs for all the apps) and start plain, as you dont want to mix these.

There is a youtube video on exactly that somewhere.

DidacticDumbass,

Ah, thank you for the write up. I will actually do that because KDE something I know I will like and enjoy more than GNOME once I get past some of the weirdness. Mostly, I want to customize it in certain ways, and while GNOME surely is customizable, it is not as easy as KDE.

Yeah, rebasing feels like some scifi future tech and I am ready to play. It is like resleeving ala Altered Carbon.

Pantherina, (edited )

I am not sure. KDE is very customizable and I like the… regular way apps work, trays work, decorations work and all that. Also GNOME is like the anti-poweruser desktop. I like its style, but its like “use a terminal or nothing”. Needing extra apps for every small thing and all…

The downside maybe is stability… and Gnome does some things well, like quicksettings and all.

I also like that GTK is easier to develop for probably, with Gnome Builder and similar tooling. But at the same time, the UI would be pretty much unusable for complex apps like Dolphin.

I tried Gimp 3.x prerelease and well, GTK3 is weird, its already this step away from the more similar styles.

Well rebasing is pretty nice, its swapping out the foundation while keeping the top intact. For things like Kinoite->Ublue-kinoite-main its just a reboot.

DidacticDumbass,

Do you need to pin the last working ostree before rebasing? I guess I want an easy way to switch between working environments without a lot of rebasing.

Pantherina,

Not necessarily if you dont have automatic updates or update manually. Only one backup is kept though, so yeah, sudo ostree admin pin 0

DidacticDumbass,

Neato. I have a strategy now for messing around.

erwan,

The first dumb thing is distro hopping to start with.

Distro are not that different in practice, just pick one and go on with your life.

DidacticDumbass,

You are right. I was happy with linux mint, and before that MX Linux. This is all just bike shedding. I spend a lot of time setting things up Hell, I spend too much time just downloading crap because I have not bothered to make a script that would automate installation of the apps I use.

Yeah, I think I will.

flashgnash,

Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)

Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves

NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others

NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference

Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled

poissonDistribution,
@poissonDistribution@lemmy.world avatar

Correct. We are used to look at computers like if they’re tools. Actually they’re environments.

flashgnash,

I look at mine like they’re toys lol

pixelscript,

I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.

hperrin,

There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.

Holzkohlen,

Nothing special, I just kept distrohopping and backing up my home folder to a seperate drive each time via rsync. Eventually I messed that up somewhere, some data was lost. I think that was early this year.
Nothing to major, bit of a nuisance is all. And a grim reminder that eventually you WILL mess up. It’s just a matter of time really. So try to minimize the factors that lead to mishaps like distrohopping and be diligent with your backups.

DidacticDumbass,

Hah. That was my strategy, but manually.

I need to learn backup tools proper.

Of course, it happens when your data is at its most valuable.

Synthead,

Make a donation to the testdisk author!

DidacticDumbass,

I will! These programs are amazing.

Deregon, (edited )
@Deregon@jlai.lu avatar

I tried dual-booting Manjaro from my Ubuntu install, since VMs were slow on my machine at the time and I wanted to give Manjaro a try.

Manjaro wouldn’t boot (X11 sessions crashes on boot), and then when I returned to Ubuntu, I got dropped straight to the GRUB rescue shell because I had shrunk the partition from the Manjaro installer, and it had fucked up the Ubuntu install :/ so instead of two OSes I had none

DidacticDumbass,

I feel like I have done that too, but long time ago. I always got confused with dual booting. I get weird trying to calculate how much to space to give each partition.

Making partitions by hand is a pain though.

mex,

dd’ed an ISO onto the system drive instead of a USB stick. Luckily, the first partition was the Windows one, so not too important; and the rest I recovered from the GPT backup table.

DidacticDumbass,

Nice! I need to learn recovery methods. I am so used to scorch earthing an install when it goes wrong, which is not useful.

mateomaui,

I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.

DidacticDumbass,

That is is a special kind grieving.

mateomaui,

I’ll never forget that scream, I thought a sound like that was reserved for when the cat ran behind the couch and stepped on the surge protector button, corrupting the hard drive as you were almost finished writing your graduate thesis, which wasn’t backed up yet.

DidacticDumbass,

Honestly a thesis is way higher stakes and value. Yeah, imagine thinking there was an emergency only to find out your roommate will need to spend the rest of the semester using their imagination.

mateomaui,

Yeah, we definitely had fun at his expense for a while after that.

DidacticDumbass,

I would be mortified. He seems shameless though, hah.

mateomaui,

He was in community theater. What shame?

DidacticDumbass,

Ah. I was in theater tech. No shame to find anywhere.

mateomaui,

Reading this thread makes me appreciate Macrium Reflect and my 64TB worth of redundant backup drives even more.

DidacticDumbass,

I might need to look into building a storage server of some kind. That is super cool.

mateomaui,

Personally, I keep the redundant backup as cold storage to minimize loss. Three 8TB content or archival drives that are always attached via USB but not powered until needed, plus another on NAS for streaming, and two more 8TB each for double backup that are only turned on when I want to do a sync. So the drives get minimal wear, and whenever a primary dies, the backups get promoted and a new one is bought to be third in line. I have lost too much data in the past. As well as I can manage, never ever again.

DidacticDumbass,

What is kind of funny is that my computer has the SSD for system and home, and I only ever used the storage to copy over files from my home. I also have a little 1TB SSD That I could have used as an offline backup… but didn’t do that. I had the tools, just never thought to do it. I will look into a NAS, that would be nifty. Can’t bork that with a new install.

mateomaui, (edited )

It only takes a few tragic events before “backup frequently, often and offline” really takes hold and doing preemptive backup becomes a neurosis. You have to experience a certain amount of fear, loss and regret to get there.

edit: the upside is I haven’t reinstalled a primary OS in years. Something is fucked? Restore that last image and keep rolling.

DidacticDumbass,

Yes. I think I am closer to data paranoia… I need a system.

That sounds nice. Not having a system that becomes terminally broken after a bad decision.

Chais, (edited )
@Chais@sh.itjust.works avatar

Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:

  1. Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
  2. dd is nicknamed ‘disk destroyer’ for good reason.
CaptDust,

😵‍💫 the 3am tinkering, it calls to me 😵‍💫

LostXOR,

Never dd at 3am, kids.

BlueEther,
@BlueEther@no.lastname.nz avatar

Not done it at 3am but have dd’d to the wrong disk late in the evening, possibly after a few vinos

flashgnash,

Fortunately my laptop only has nvmes built in, so 99% of the time all 3am me has to do is not type nvme and I’m good

DidacticDumbass,

Oh, am I talking to myself? Hah.

Yeah, I wish I had all the stuff I torrented in high school. Lost treasure.

cmnybo,

When using dd, check the command before pressing enter, then check it again for good measure.

MonkderZweite,

then replace dd with cat or cp.

onion,
  1. Disconnect all other drives
MonkderZweite, (edited )

… no use in dd to write an image to disk. Just use cat/cp/pv…

dd is a scalpell, not a shovel.

Useless use of dd

techwithjake, (edited )

Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Wrecked my first Ubuntu install over the course of 2 years, wanted something new and tried Arch. The 4th time pacman wrecked my system I moved to Fedora at around F20 and have been happy ever since. I tried Gentoo in there somewhere, and managed to install it, but just the install burned me out. That was back when the Sakaki guide was one of the only ways to install on UEFI except with Fedora.

I would say my biggest mistake was not understanding the scope of Linux and that something like Arch and Gentoo are more for a CS grad student level of user.

I have a much better understanding of operating system design principals and architectures now, but I still prefer Fedora, really because the Anaconda system, Nvidia kernel driver build system, and UEFI shim are the best system for Linux I have encountered. The bootloader is one of the largest vulnerabilities in modern computers.

DidacticDumbass,

Something I am learning is that an install of a distro can last as long as you want it to.

Curiosity leads us to mistakes, but more often to things much cooler than what we knew before!

A computer is like a second home the more I think about it.

I am glad you learned a lot from those experiences!

Aatube,
@Aatube@kbin.social avatar

Nowadays, you have options like endeavorOS.

rez_doggie,

Those aren’t fuckups they are learning experiences. Now you know what that does in that situation.

DidacticDumbass,

Yes! I am becoming more careful. I am definitely getting deeper in my knowledge of programs and linux. The stuff to learn is immense. But, it makes my life so much better.

mesamunefire,

I accidentally formatted a drive with a Bitcoin wallet on it. Back a number of years ago. Fun times.

DidacticDumbass,

Oof. I mean… yes. Oof.

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