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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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".

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.
👍 never had to start over
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.
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'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 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.

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!

"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
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.
Tell me more
- Timeshift was a gamechanger

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!

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.

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.

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)_/¯

This is the way!

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 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 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.

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

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

Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.

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.