edit: for anyone curious, the problem was Xorg wasnt loading or something (stuck on systemd ‘graphical interface target reached’ with no graphical interface). because of a typo in a config file.
Signed,
Windows users
ow, my [registry keys]
I question who these imaginary windows users are.
I set up Windows for my parents. The biggest challenges is them not not knowing how to log into their email. Every 2-3 years, I move their stuff to the cloud and throw in a fresh Windows. Did that for 15 years. Not once did I have to mess with any weird settings for them.
During the pandemic, hating windows 11, I switched them over to linux. Every month, there’s a new problem. Audio stopped working. Had some DNS issues (that required me to zoom call my brother) They did some weird things where they downloaded two Google chromes (?). I’d have to run updates manually because I don’t trust them to open up terminal.
Already Linux for my parents requires more support than anything else.
I still plan to keep encouraging them to use Linux, because I really don’t like the new WIn11 updates.
Your parents have root or what?
It’s probably best to use an immutable distro like NixOs or Fedore SilverBlue when installing for people who don’t know Linux and don’t want to learn
Honestly the worst part about Windows is the fact that sometimes it will restart to install updates through the night, closing everything you had opened. The preinstalled garbage is also annoying, but can be uninstalled easily.
Outside that, it honestly just works. It’s great for old people.
My experience has been the same as yours. Trying to get WiFi, Audio, webcam, bluetooth, GPU, etc. working on a Linux distro is a nightmare. Then when you get it working somewhat, it’ll just be randomly borked the next time you boot your system. Requiring another 5 hours and 600 tabs of research to figure out what you did to fix it the first time.
The preinstalled garbage is also annoying, but can be uninstalled easily.
Edge begs to differ
My mom barely uses desktop anymore. Everything on iPad essentially. I’m chuckling thinking of what she’d do to me if I tried to migrate her to linux.
Different people’s experiences are different. My Linux installs are stable. My Windows installs are garbage.
Which distro are you using? For what you describe, it should be something like Pop! OS or Ubuntu.
For real. I spend a lot less time supporting my Ubuntu users than Windows users. I push them into Ubuntu not for ideological or moral reasons but to save my hair. I keep saying Ubuntu because I mean it. Some folks picture Arch or some other non-boring OS when people say Linux and that would be counterproductive in this context.
I question who these imaginary windows users are.
I set up Windows for my parents. The biggest challenges is them not not knowing how to log into their email. Every 2-3 years, I move their stuff to the cloud and throw in a fresh Windows. Did that for 15 years. Not once did I have to mess with any weird settings for them.
Read the following in a super friendly tone.
Sounds like you might be one of these Windows users. 😁 Most Linux users I know, who have managed to kick the Windows reinstall habit, install Linux at the time of hardware purchase and never reinstall. It’s a robust habit taught to us by Microsoft’s not-that-great software combined with lax documentation. Personally I’m on Linux since 2005 and only managed to kick the habit around 2012. My current main machine I built in 2014. Installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it and it’s just been upgraded ever since. It got switched from Intel to AMD half way through. Its SSD setup changed from SATA to NVMe, then NVMe MDRAID. Several graphics cards replacements. Zero reinatalls. A friend of mine has an Ubuntu install that dates to 10.04. The better you understand how the system works, the more pointless it becomes to nuke and pave.
During the pandemic, hating windows 11, I switched them over to linux. Every month, there’s a new problem. Audio stopped working. Had some DNS issues (that required me to zoom call my brother) They did some weird things where they downloaded two Google chromes (?). I’d have to run updates manually because I don’t trust them to open up terminal.
Already Linux for my parents requires more support than anything else.
Sounds like an administration issue. Ubuntu LTS with unattended upgrades and without sudo membership for their users wouldn’t run into surprising breakage, update problems or unwanted installed software. Or Debian stable for that matter but that’s more work to setup.
I did that as a beginner a few times but now I’m able to resolve everything I need to with the good old terminal.
sometimes i just cant be bothered figuring out why systemd isnt starting a graphical interface, or whatever, and reinstalling doesnt take very long if you have a home partition
Figuring out? It’s right there in the logs.
Fast disks are spoiling the next generation. Back in the day, 2 minutes reading could save you half an hour of reinstalling. But if reinstalling takes about the same amount of time, I guess there’s no more incentive to actually learn something.
You done use anything but the base system install? No extra software? Are you okay?
I am new to desktop linux. It is a pain to not know certain troubleshooting steps as I do mostly for server linux.
For example, not knowing what the gui consists of, which applications are essential and which are not.
In that case I would like to recommend you install Arch at least once. Not to actually use in production, but it made a lot of things click for me that help me with server stuff too. Just follow along with the install guide on the wiki inside of a VM.
If you really want to know what applications are essential I’d install a window manager and not just install the gnome package. Though even just installing your favourite DE will work fine.
I’ve heard other people recommend Gentoo and Linux from scratch as well for this purpose since they go even deeper, but that may be too much to start off with and I haven’t done that myself
Thank you very much for this suggestion. i will spin up a vm on virtualbox asap to check this out. :)
I feel this, especially the GUI/Desktop essential stuff, and I have been daily driving Linux on desktop for about 8 years now.
Going from Debian with Mate to Arch with AwesomeWM (minimal tiled window manager), there is a lot you actually need to know and it’s convoluted how it interacts with each other, a lot of it is thru dbus but some things go thru env variables - .xprofile, .profile, bashrc/zshrc, pam_env.
Yesterday I found out I am actually not running any gui polkit agents - I had it installed (possibly for years) but the .deskop file had OnlyShowIn=Xfce so Dex didn’t autostart it.
Sometimes I do feel like I am just making my life harder for no reason but I love the minimal UI and kb navigation.
Thank you very much for this explanation. i will try to check out some books on the matter. I feel like we (as in the community around linux) need to have a chat about helping others and not judging. :) we have a great opportunity here to gather a lot more users from windows but we wont until we manage to actually welcome and not insult them all the time.
The real terminal fun comes from accidentally entering grub’s rescue mode when you fuck the config up, and then having to frantically remember how to boot linux manually
I’m just glad I have more than one device with internet access in my home. The one time a vm update was pushed to desktop users on Linux Mint, killing the desktop for anyone who got the update. I had to use my phone to find out what how to restore my pc.
Uh oh… hd0… insmod something ??? Chainload…er…?
Haven’t reinstalled a distro in probably a decade.
Same. And I never fucking will. I will learn how to fix it if it kills me.
The last time I reinstalled a distro to fix an issue was Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
aw, you got better :)
Throw away system
Buy new one
First install!
Discard computer. Return to monke
- What distro?
- Are you hiring? If not, are you mentoring?
- I make a great [food]!
- Or have you just been stuck using Windows for the past ten years?
Have done the same with Windows.
Only on new systems, or on systems not owned by me.
Cannot relate to that. I modify the crap out of my Arch install and keep it in perfect condition all the time.
7 years strong here with only 1 reinstall to switch to 64 bit
Same as my Windows installs.
2 reinstalls now* I had to upgrade my NVME drive and the old one shit the bed while I was moving data, so everything on this system is fresh now… At least I keep the important stuff backed up in git haha
I was definitely scared if Arch before trying it. Seemed like the general consensus was that it wasn’t a matter of if Arch would break, but when. I heard that updating everything will eventually break the system. Well, I figured, I’d like to try it just to see. I haven’t had a single problem and it’s the setup I’m most proud of l, having spent the most amount of time building it up to exactly how I like it.
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- Eventually return to Mint and admit you don’t know as much as you thought you did
- You get bored again and find NixOS, and your head explodes, but you have found the final distro.
oh no it’s time again…
I have nix on a VM where I am tuning a config. It seems like a total pain in the ass to have to get everything set up using their scripting language. Things you just take for granted with a normal distro now require you to know the arcane language of Nix to get running.
I can absolutely see the advantage of it though. I would love nothing more than to take my current popOS install, settings, configs, etc and be able to port that literally anywhere.
I mean, I use NixOS daily, and aside from installing the occasional package or setting up some dot files, I don’t really touch my Nix config. NixOS was my first daily driver Linux distro and it has a lot of features that I probably take for granted. Early on, I felt like switching from GNOME to KDE. Two lines. Later on installed Hyprland, no problem, then switched to XMonad(had some Wayland issues) and it was stupidly painless.
Sure, Nix has its “fuck you” moments too, but those are usually never anything truly system-breaking, and can be fixed after an hour or two of Discord support chats. In my eyes, the benefits of Nix definitely outweigh the flaws. Do I wish it was a slightly more sane language? Perhaps. But it’s really when you start using it that you learn to appreciate everything you get. Seriously, I much prefer editing a couple of lines in a config file to pasting commands off the Internet in hopes to achieve what I’m looking for.
NixOS is, imho, the best Linux distro for programmers or anyone with a decent understanding of Linux (obviously not for computer noobs, and that’s totally fine).
Wow first Linux distro, not bad, it’s not particularly beginner friendly (you’ll have to know how linux works and learn all the Nix related stuff), for me it’s the last distro though^^
I’d had a decent understanding of Linux going in, tbf. Mostly from hanging out on Discord with tons of Linux users. My Nix system is still quite young (a little over 2 months old), but it’s great.
Getting off the ground was kinda hard though. Luckily, I’ve been using flakes from the very beginning and always setup my dot files with home manager, so I’ve kept the system nice and reproducible.
For those interested, here’s my dot files.
It’s not for everyone. I think it’s almost a requirement to be a programmer, and to be familiar with functional programming. It also has quite a few (necessary?) quirks/magic (module system, overlays, typing, config overrides etc.).
Actually one of my colleagues just switched from Pop OS! since System76 put all focus into their new desktop environment (while the current distro is barely maintained), which will be available on NixOS too, when it’s ready (which is his plan to use, and mine too).
As long as you arent doing anything to advanced nix is basically only a configuration languages. You probably have to make heavy use of the option search to know where and what to configure
I didn’t even know the option search existed. I just asked ChatGPT and it just tells me the option I need.
ChatGPT is not yet really good for Nix, probably because the training set consists of not that much nix yet. So yeah browsing in nixpkgs and either the options or package search is the way to go IMO.
I tried NixOS in a VM with 2GB memory and the package manager OOM’d when searching for a package…stayed with Tumbleweed on my metal.
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… but if you do it starts here https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/prologue/foreword.html
I had a lot of fun few years ago.
Please, always use a dedicated hard drive to tinker with LFS, never ever try anything on a machine that’s suppose to be used for work or do anything else. You’ll think this is common sense, but it’s anything but. LFS is involved, complex and takes a significant chunk of time. Make sure you don’t need that machine you’re tinkering on.
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I feel personally offended by this
This is a very accurate comment. I do like this every damn time. It has been years now lol!
In enterprise, this usually is the way. No sense wasting engineer hours troubleshooting something in prod when you can use Ansible to replace the system and restore data in 10 minutes (while your redundant system handles the load of course).
Who made this, a windows user? Friggin meme is backwards
I really had to chuckle when reading the comments.
Linux broke, had to reinstall: -“we do this in bussiness too!”
Windows broke. had to reinstall: -“LOL! Shitty Windows, install Linux!”
Makes me curious, can you have a Windows image leading you to work without any interaction? (e.g no activation, mounted data partition, etc)
Of course. Windows is the most widely used business OS for a reason.
They have options to manage anything, even reinstall Windows every time you open your laptop if you so wish. With preinstalled software, activation, mounting drives, specialised settings through GPO, … and fully automated.
Any example? Curious to see how it compare to e.g NixOS.
my current install is 3 yrs old, if you select a decent distro and dont fuck with its internals it works pretty well.
i suspect most of the people complaining are either on a meme distro or they poke too much into the system
You seem to implying that doing anything other than using preinstalled apps like the web browser is “poking too much into the system” and are therefore idiots. As I have had a system break just by installing or upgrading packages on Ubuntu. Now I always use ZFS on root and make snapshots of everything beforehand.
I installed Ubuntu on my desktop I wasn’t using for a while, then had to wipe it again a couple hours later after I seemingly bricked my OS installing a package necessary to run AppImages, except it uninstalled some pretty critical shit
What would you suggest is a meme distro, I’m using endeavour os, it is imo perfection almost.
Whatever distribution I tried something didn’t work or failed to boot
meme distro
Which distros are “meme distros”?
I don’t know what they meant by “meme distros”, but I can say that the thing that immediately comes to mind is TempleOS.
TempleOS isn’t even Linux.
The only time I’ve ever done this on Linux was 20 years ago, trying to f with XF86 before I understood it.
Reinstalling is the Windows way of solving problems.
Additionally, going full Linux and then trying to install Windows again is a nightmare (but I guess that’s not really what we’re talking about here).
I learned the hard way to never trust windows to not destroy other disks. One time it decided to place the boot partition on a disk it saw having a unknown file system. Turns out it was a disk on a raid-array. After that I physically unpower all other disks before installing windows.
I reinstall on every boot…
I reinstall every hour via cronjob
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Just see your systems as cattle, not pets. That way you can do this. Usually done through infrastructure as code like Ansible. NixOs is perfect for this use case
Love nix
Me too!
This is the way
I mean, who doesn’t use snapshots these days? BTRFS / ZFS has saved me days of grief.
As an Arch user, BTRFS has saved me SO much pain, suffering, and time. BTRFS is a LIFESAVER!
Just the other day I was experimenting with making my own AUR package and blew away my /bin…… snapper is good I like snapper
You need to rethink your reinstall process. My root is on a separate drive from my home directory. My home directory has a script that installs all of my basic software, along with any specific config files that don’t reside in my home directory naturally. I can reinstall the system in about an hour.
Yeah, I use NixOS so my whole system is defined in a couple config files, so when reinstalling I can just point the installer at my config and get (pretty much) the exact same system. Same packages, git config, aliases, package versions, firewall rules, kernel version, etc, only thing missing is a couple dotfiles I haven’t switched over yet but those are synced using Syncthing anyways.
This is basically what I used to do with Windows before I switched. All my document, picture, videos, music links pointed to my storage drive and I had a ninite installer with all my required programs ready to go. Plus my barebones microsoft account I used to save all my Windows settings so they just loaded right up when logging in after the new install.
Do you have/know of a guide to pull this kind of thing off on Mint?
Honestly, unfortunately no. I’ve been doing this since before Redhat split off Fedora. All my scripts are custom. I just rewrite them as new distros are released.
I used to use Ninite, but Chocolatey has so many more packages. These days I only have to export my package list to a file, reinstall windows, install chocolatey and install the packages by importing the file. That just leaves my favourite debloat script, some light setting changes and maybe the one or two programs that aren’t on Chocolatey
Surprising to me so I must do some things right :
- dedicated /home partition
- OS on SSD, new OS on fast USB stick
- backup on another physical disk of important data (usually a subset of /home )
- other partition for OS testing
- other working device for instructions and search online (mobile phone is usually enough)
- documented setup for complex tools, e.g /home/Prototypes where you might have container setups, e.g docker-compose.yml
Usually if you have this in place its a matter of hour, at most. Sure in 1h you will not have ALL the apps you need perfectly configured but, for me at least, enough to feel at “home” again. It’s usually about having ~/.bashrc or ~/.tridactilrc in place but if you do have /home on another partition, it’s basically “free”.
I have only really done this while i used windows, on linux i have always been able to find a solution that didn’t require reinstalling; on windows on the other hand i had a time where it just started to bluescreen at every boot out of nowhere…
Meanwhile I’ve had Linux distros just completely bork themselves 20 minutes after install. Or during an update. Or while running a terminal command, because the “friendly” Linux community refused to give me GUI instructions, or simply explain what the command did.
They should explain what the commands do. Nobody should be blindly copy-pasting commands into their terminal.
Also, consider the source. Advice you get from Stack Overflow is going to be better than what you get from some random you DMed who said they were a “Linux ninja”.
