I somehow broke my Debian bookworm install…

If you reinstall enough things, enough times, it becomes a kink.

Use Timeshift, use Timeshift, use Timeshift.

In the olden days, I would have spent hours to fix it, completely forget everything I've done over the course of those several hours and then having to reinstall it bcs I've broken something else in those unsuccessful attempts and now dont have the energy to figure out this clusterfuck too.

Ahh, good memories.

Got into an argument about this once. The other person insisted that if I wipe my hard drive and reinstall, that I’m a pathetic moron who doesn’t deserve to use a computer.

In fairness, it’s usually better to fix things so you can learn, but dang they were toxic.

You learn plenty by breaking and reinstalling. I don't considering it an invalid option for a home user. I had to reinstall MacOS7/8 and Windows 95/98 so many times as a kid. Learned a lot doing it, sysadmin now 🤷‍♂️

Pffft. I just boot from a live cd so changes are gone at reboot. Why install if you're just going to break something?

i, too, nuked my bookworm install today after fiddling with Nvidia drivers. keeping /home on its own part is such a lifehack

Button #3: Restore TimeShift snapshot.

Second approach is better as it teaches you to fix and understand the system you're working with

Of course, this is a more complicated and energy - demanding approach, though. But if you wanna stay on Linux, you better figure such stuff out, this will be invaluable in the long run.

I should also mention that Debian, despite the Bookworm introducing more user-friendly options, is not a newbie-centered distribution and fixing things in there tend to be more tedious for an inexperienced user.

The upside, however, is that once you've set it up, everything will just work. But first you might face some pain.

with great power comes great resposibility.

use sudo wisely, or not at all.

My laptop's mic seems to have some contact issues. It never worked for a second on windows. I put Linux on it, and it usually just works. When it doesn't, some percussive maintenance does a quick job of fixing it. I guess I was dealt the opposite hand than usual.

Refresh OS feature in popos has been a game changer for me

There's a cheat button called sudo snapper rollback in OpenSUSE, it can be had in other distros as well.

Laughs in Fedora Atomic

As a gentoo user, spending hours trying to fix it is usually the better option.

This is why I’ve yet to make the leap from windows. I just don’t have the technical chops nor spare time to make my OS a hobby.

Yesterday I tried to format and encrypt a usb drive, accidentally encrypted the main drive and it wouldn't boot to a snapshot before that. Decided to go for EndevourOS (Arch BTW) instead of Tumbleweed because I found Tumbleweeds installer too complicated.

Why doesnt the mass public liek Linux!?

Once you learn about BRTFS snapshots you'll never have this issue again

My wifi card just stops working after a resume from suspend. I cannot get it to come back after resume. After some time fucking with it, I just turned off suspend. And turned on close lid = power down. EZ.

in my first couple years I basically kept spamming left "oops I bricked the dependencies again, welp time to get the usb out"

It's funny seeing this like literally a couple days after I decided it would be easier to reinstall my Mint sysyem than to fix the audio issues Pipewire was causing. I'm back on PulseAudio and haven't had issues since.

I can't get sound to work probably on bookworm with an pretty old (10 yrs) system. It's so confusing between pipewire, pulseaudio and alsa.

Real shit.

Sounds familiar

I just learned yesterday, that you have to switch vulkan packages (including lib32 version) if you switch to proprietary nvidia driver 😂 only to learn that I don’t have enough RAM for cyberpunk, after it finally started..

2x16gb is on its way 🥳

Hah. I'm sure once I read the rest of the responses I'll see the observation that 1 is just a slow route to 2

Reminds me of when I started using git lol.

How about NixOS where the OS automatically installs the correct software and chooses the right settings. Then you have the time fiddle on your config for hours 🌈

Press both

por que no los dos

Would change distro to something easier to maintain (like Arch for example), rice the experience to the oblivion, keep it forever :3

Classic Scylla and Charybdis. Good luck on your odyssey.

This is how Tumbleweed cured my distrohopping—out-of-the-box Snapper meant painless rollbacks.

Terraform destroy

Terraform apply

*laughs in fedora atomic* debian could have a atomic version, ostree is distro agnostic

Re-installs are for scrubs windows users. We don't do that here. SSH from other machine, chroot from live usb, switch to TTY or even UEFI interactive shell. Fix your shit, and get to understand how it works while at it.

Debian is not a good distro for desktop usage. You cannot change my mind.

Linux is only free if your time has no value, and this is why.