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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 reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.
Phew, so I’m not alone? 😂
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC… then someone replied “wait wouldn’t just running the ‘install VLC’ command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?”
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won’t work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn’t run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn’t run on many laptops – I don’t know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn’t work, and it couldn’t sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can’t remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn’t sleep >_>
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.
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?
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please tell me there is a way to flash a bootable stick on a phone… a windows stick, on ios!
There was on android, but they removed it. Gave me a real headache when I needed to flash a sd card and the only reader was the one on the phone
Ventoy makes it easy. Create a bootable stick/sd once, and you can copy as many .iso files to it as you want. At boot, ventoy lets you select the specific .iso you want to boot.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
You’re underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there…
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn’t threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
I always talk nicely to my computers. They’re trying their best, and sometimes I have to accept their best isn’t what I hoped for today.
Yeah, that’s when the threat of violence come in handy.
The
dualitybinary of man
Bricked a laptop by trying to flash Coreboot onto it and forgetting to put my original BIOS in the build…
I had a spare parts laptop and reused the motherboard but still, big oopsies on my part.
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And a second weekend to actually make a working bootable Windows USB.
You can make a bootable windows USB in like 15 minutes using the media creation tool.
Way better than the old days of copying ISOs and muckong about with creating partitions on a thumb drive.
To be honest, you need that weekend with Linux too but it’s fun instead of dread, and you get to set it up in a whole new way
And the fix is understandable. The number of times I’ve had to fuck with Windows and never quite understood what I did that made it work, because you couldn’t repeat it twice. Sometimes it was just the number of reboots you needed to do for it to uncross the turd caught sideways and suddenly work fine, until it didn’t…
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As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.
That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don’t have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.
One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn’t have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.
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.
Have you heard about Ventoy? You can have 1 pendrive with all the ISO-s you would want. Currently i have like 10 distros on my thumbdrive.
Plus you could use the pendrive as a regular storage as well besides the ISOs.
I have that, too, but I don’t have a USB with more than 32GB. It has a stripped down win11 and a Linux mint.
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.
Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.
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.
My second computer broke ;.;
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.
At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking “Error Code
0x0000000f” and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of “assistant” on the official forum suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that’s ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.I’ll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
I had a BSoD on Windows that googling said “could be hardware or software related”. Thanks, I guess. Nothing in the logs even suggested anything happened except the several hours gap between other useless logs.
To be fair a lot of the time a blue screen is shitty drivers…
Blue screens are usually a defense against shitty code fucking over the hardware.
It halts the entire computer to prevent the hardware from being damaged.
I don’t know what Linux does to prevent that, but I hope it has something similar.
The Linux equivalent is a kernel panic
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Have you had severe fuckups yearly with Windows, or Linux?
I’ve had bi-yearly severe fuckups with Windows and have yearly (probably more) severe fuckups with Arch;
the fix to the latter is a thumb drive away, the fix to the former is an ancient ritual which the FBI is still investigating me for.deleted by creator
You mean as long as you pay windows tax by buying a new computer regularly and dont ask for privacy, free software, etc. :)
I’ve been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like “tore critical system components I don’t need out from the install media” level of customized. A good chunk of the “modify windows for privacy” tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren’t there on my install.
No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
I agree that its common across all distros. I disagree on self inflicted. Its as if you didnt bother to teach tour kid to ride a bike and laugh at them for falling.
We’re a massively diseducated population by now. Friends of mine complain when they have to use a file system instead of buttons to open files and are shocked that making an app instead is expensive.
I just retired a 2012 Windows 7 machine that had never received any patches/updates.
Never crashed, never had issues.
I’ve run Windows boxes even longer than that.
Since Win2k, stability improved drastically. XP was another major shift.
Linux is like running NT4 by comparison (and NT4 was damn stable).
Ah riiiight! Which version of windows runs trains and airplanes again? Which version of windows runs on modern cars?
Tons of airports and train systems run either Windows 3.0 or Windows XP if they are recent.
They don’t want to update because they have already encountered every problem that could arise ever. Which they know how to fix in mere minutes.
And upgrading anything would mean the entire business can’t function during it. Afterwards you also have tons of new problems that could take days to fix since they don’t have the knowledge yet. Which could endanger lives.
… modern cars run Windows? D:
Exactly my point. Every device on the planet runs linux, except a couple desktop pcs.
Phew, you had me worried there for a sec
Not modern anymore, but early Ford Sync was technically Windows…
Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they’d gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that’s what gets them
Its systemic. You cant fault them for it because it is the majority. That means that on average it is not possible and we need to address this.
I’ve never seen an ad in Windows itself. Not sure how people are getting that.
Just to be clear: while I’ve seen ads in one form or another in every (non-LTSC) installation of Windows 10 and 11 I’ve ever made, I’m not claiming that Windows 11 actually shows unskippable ads (in video format) when using the start menu
yet, that was a hyperbole.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn’t working or ssh’ing into my machine when the video output doesn’t work
Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures
If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I’d have a nickel.
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
I’ve been there. I’m 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit “Enter”
And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
REISUB
This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
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
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