A big part of learning Linux is screwing up computers and starting over.

Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.

No no no! When you break something in Linux systems you fix it. Starting over and reinstalling everything is what you do when you mess up on Windows.
- Funny I did not expect so many people that resist starting over. Next time I'll give fixing stuff a shot :)
  
  It is more about being lazy.
  In most cases, where you havn't destroyed your filesystem, you can just boot another Linux from a USB stick, mount your filesystems to /mnt, chroot into it, and then investigate and fix there.
  See the Archlinux wiki, even if you do not use Archlinux, it is great: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
- Generally yes. My exception was the time i accidentally nuked python in it's entirety...
  
  Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your "manual installation".
  Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.

Pretty much everytime I try to do fancy stuff with the bootloader I get pretty close to nuking systems. Worst was my 1st UEFI system where I was trying to get rEFInd to show multiple OS to boot from... eventually gave up and went back to the warm embrace of GRUB
- I just had 8 titles in boot menu all for the same OS. 🤌😅 I know exactly what I'm doing. It's a dual boot system.
- If you take the plunge and switch to systemd-boot it's worth it. It's the only boot manager I've tried in the last decade that feels like an upgrade from GRUB.
  
  🤔 Maybe I'll try that next time... I kinda feel loyal to Grub, it's been my friend for sooo looong.

It's even better if your only internet connection is that computer you broke.
- This is the nightmare of my last 2 weeks. Well 11 days.
- Ah yes, reminds me of messing with my 1st pfSense firewall... I learned how good their recovery process was that evening
  
  Just bricked my Proxmox install an hour ago and I had the pleasure to learn their recovery process sucks. (At least for my case)
- Great incentive to learn even faster
  
  And enforces the value of installing documentation and source packages 😅

I just spent 11 days on a dual boot repair in fstab, passwd, loads of ecryptfs, amongst other boot and login issues. Before restoring from the full system backup after getting mad to finally want to use my PC. 11 fucking days almost all day in terminal. TOO many partitions and too many folders inside of folders to get to my ecryptfs files. I got so lost LSing around.
After it all though, and it was an aneurism and a half. I still want to finish my goal and reinstall my dual boot this time correctly aiming the folders correctly.
- Might help to draw it out on paper
  But, when you're done, you'll be the Encrypted Dual-Boot God !

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.

Never the kernel but just about every time I touch /etc/fstab I fuck something up. I've done that a lot....
- Oh, I typed that line wrong to mount the drive and because the non-os drive isn't detected you're only going to boot to emergency mode?
  Cool cool cool.
- I've messed fstab, passwd, and others up so many times. It's a stroke to fix it and not being able to use your system for days. Zaps the drive to even mess with the computer.

Maybe 1 or 2 back when things were less stable, but any time I have used Linux in the past 7 years or so, and particularly since I started using Debian as my primary OS, I haven't had any problems outside of trying to get some windows applications to emulate correctly, and one time when I echo'd into sources.list with > instead of >>. Anything else is just stuff I had to learn, like my boot folder filling up with old images that have to be cleaned out occasionally.
- If you want shit to just work when you want and stay out the way when you aren't using it. Debian of whatever source is what they call stability. I've done rolling, and bleeding edge. It's all a constant pain. Becomes a job to maintain or bug track or check logs. I'll never go back.
  
  That was my thought as well.
  Back when I was new to Linux, I tried a lot of different distros in virtualization for shorter periods of time, and of course ran into the issues that come with the cutting edge stuff.
  Last year I wanted to install a distribution to my laptop properly as a test before putting it onto my desktop, and I came to that same conclusion because at the end of the day I couldn't justify using bleeding edge, because I couldn't really even name anything I NEEDED from it. Yes, it is fun to have cool, new things, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with in a VM or something, but I don't actually need any of that stuff for what I do on a computer day to day right this second.
  After that, the answer was pretty clear for me as to what distribution to use.

May I introduce you to my lord and saviour NixOS?
- Knock Knock Knock.
  We (Jehovah's Witness) would like to know if you had a minute, so we could come inside, and talk to you about OUR Lord and Savior... Linux Mint.
  
  Sure, ok, that's still my daily driver, it's incredibly stable (and no, it's not fucking outdated), but other than that it doesn't help so much against accidentally borking your system.
  So in this context, I'm recommending @sockpuppetsociety@lemm.ee NixOS.

I tried to use dd with too much hubris once. I had to restore from backups (which ironically, I had made with dd). I'm usually overly cautious, but I was in a hurry.
- I did this one a few weeks ago lmao. You think once would be enough. But I am a truly special being.

So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn't get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?
I think I'm past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I've never had to use 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

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!
- Every time I install or configure anything, it's done via CLI and added to a script. Makes setup a breeze.
- 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.
  
  100%
  The alternative being variations on:
  Hi my name is [redacted], I have [X] years experience.
  Please run sfc /scannow.
  You can find more help at [Irrelevant KB URL].
  Please rank me 5 stars.
  Ticket closed
- 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
  
  Giving our computer ghonorrea by downloading Napster mp3s
  
  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
- Tell me more
  
  Timeshift was a gamechanger

1

.... So what should I try Linux again?
- You mean why? Because you're using your bare machine, you can use it as you wish. No nanny software limiting the fun or productivity
  
  Yeah but breaking like six computers to do it, or one computer six times, seems like a pretty steep price for that when I basically just use my computer for gaming browsing and the occasional audio/video edit.

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!
- See that would be a good analogy if the fail was fun.
  Making a shit painting is still fun.
  Having to reinstall my OS because I ran pacman -Syu and now my computer won't boot, and now I have to spend hours making things work again: not at all fun.
  Having my server run out of memory and freeze up instead of having a sane out of memory behavior the day before a long trip: not fun
  It's also archaic, niche information. Do I want to learn how to make a kernel version that didn't get installed right show up in grub? Fuck no. Do I want to google for the 100th time what command exists to register the encryption key for my hard drive in the TPM? Fuck no. What an absolute waste of life.
  Linux isn't "I cut a hole in my wall" it's "my electrician only documented the wiring in hieroglyphs and now I have to reverse engineer everything to turn on a light bulb".

Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it's functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.
- 😂 My gosh this hits home. If only I could stop tweaking. It's always just this one little thing. Then another and on until it's so fucked I don't even know where to begin. But it's magical when she works.
- I get mine set up how I want then create an HD image that I run in a VM for fucking with.
- That also sounds like a good way to stop learning!
  
  you can either have a system to learn on, or a stable system to work on.
  
  Not quite. But sorta, yeah.
  Learning to "not fuck with it" or ways to do so and rollback are valid lessons themselves.
  Being able to segregate "production" and "development" environments is very valuable.

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
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Gang. The only distro I haven't been able to break after 6 months (well, I have, but I've been able to snapper rollback every time)
  
  It's the first rolling distro I have tried, and I've been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It's surprisingly solid, and everything's up to date.
  Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it's up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don't intrude, and they are fast.
- Been looking for a DR system for Ubuntu or mint, need to look into it myself but would like some feedback if this could be the right ticket.
  I just bought a raspberry pi 4 to host plex, I'm sure I could get it to do backup and restore too. Looking into it
- 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.

Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.
When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!

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 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 think we are using linux very differently. Mine is two and one of those was a dead ssd.

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!

Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation... And couldn't figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.
Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.

Unbootable systems in the dozens. I think I've only fucked up the kernel itself a few times. But grub or other bootloader tons, desktop environment tons, and getting into states so broken the only readily available option was reinstall, dozens. Thankfully most of these were right after a fresh install. For example dual booting just doesn't work right for some OS installers and grub fails. Manjaro bricked itself after an update. Etc. etc.

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.

Both, to the point it doesn't boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it's easier to jist start over.
- Reply fail?

I started nearly 30 years ago and cannot count the dead systems I have left in my wake. Just on the 2000-ish thing where Dell first offered Linux but it was inherently unstable after booting the pre-written disk image if you touched it, alone... So many kernel sanity failures...
- They died for a reason, for yor growth
  
  True, sacrifices on the altar of the God Sysadmin, and their divine mount Er'orreport
- I'm lucky to have only had one system nuked by a faulty power supply that shut down during a kernel update.
  I usually just reinstalled back then. But I didn't get into it till the late nineties. Back when Ian was still on the list serves.
  Unless you mean nuking the OS or borking the bootloader. Then yeah, countless.

I'm on my second install now. I fucked up the first one pretty handily by accidentally wiping the boot partition in gparted. (Like a complete idiot, because the partitions are labeled.)

I've never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.

I used to have a side system with /home on its own partition precisely to learn different distros and setups. It makes it much easier having a partition which is retained.
These days, qemu is your friend for playing around with random Linux stuff.

It do be like that, at least for the first couple years, and typically with decreasing frequency.

i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch

I learned by a lot of distro hopping, tweaking and tuning and compiling kernels (way back when tho), to not being afraid of "breaking things." Since Nov. 1992. It helps when you use a spare PC or laptop though, no panic about loss

I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.
Of course that's after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it
- Ah Chroot bro

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.

Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
- Ah, have you found the land of IoT? Bricks everywhere, you'd love it.
  
  You're suggesting I should follow the yellow brick road to find the Wizard of iOT?

Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)
- I just spent 11 days not using my PC. Your sweating after an hour 😂 I was thinking about what laptop I'm gonna buy to replace this broken desktop.

I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again

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!

Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.
- What about Rsync. Does it get love? Any snapshot is good if it works. Backups are the shit.
  
  Snapshots let you very easily revert back to an older snapshot. They're relatively fast and lightweight.
  You should have offsite backups too. Snapshots won't help if your computer catches fire, gets stolen, etc. Rsync is okay, but has a bunch of downsides:
  It only gives you a single copy.
  If the source data gets corrupted, the backup copy will also get corrupted.
  It's not safe from ransomware since the client has full write access to the rsync backup (and thus malicious code could delete the backup).
  A backup solution like Borgbackup + borgmatic or restic is a better solution and solves the above issues:
  You can easily take daily backups - all the data is deduplicated so it won't take much more space (assuming you're not changing every file every day).
  Multiple backups means that if newer data is corrupted, you can just pull files from an older backup.
  Borgmatic has an append-only mode that only allows a client to add new data to a backup, and not delete any old data. This prevents the client from being able to erase the backups