I hear this is a rite of passage. I made it 4 weeks before I rekt all my shit (it was nvidia related). Where do I claim my sticker?
In all seriousness, now that I understand better these commands that I’ve been haphazardly throwing around, Id like to do a clean install. God knows what else Ive done to it. Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?
the truest form of Linux, without all the GNU bloat, well done! :)
Couple days ago I accidentally removed a package, not fully understanding what would happen. Ended up logging out thinking nothing of it. Couldn’t log back in as there were zero sessions available. Also, for some reason a huge on-screen keyboard kept popping up a lot when I’d click on the login panels things.
I am very grateful my distro came with Timeshift by default and that I had a backup from the day before to fix everything. Also glad Rescuezilla allowed me to install Timeshift and restore.
Doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe, it’s definitely a rite of passage to break your system once. That is something I’ll always agree with.
Last week I accidentally overwrite my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don’t, that file contains a description of your entire system – all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.
I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that’s not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn’t that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.
Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.
If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.
If you don’t mess with the partitions during the install and don’t format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.
make sure not to reformat though. it can be a problem depending on the installer his distro uses.
i think its safer to just save the home folder, and replace it later when the system is installed.
My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
GRUB
i for one welcome our grub bootlorders
“AI is gonna take over the world”
Grub: “Hold ma beer”
Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?
Yes, but you might have to muck around with
/etc/fstab. The reason is because when you install to your root partition, the installer will create a new /home in that root partition. (Unless you have an installer that’s smart enough that you can tell it otherwise.)You should be able to mount the partition in any case, but to have the system recognize it as /home it has to be properly set up in fstab.
Ahh, baby steps.
Around fours years ago I was still using Arch and I somehow decided to try LFS on my main machine (bare metal unfortunately). Started compiling coreutils but as I forgot to specify the build directory to gmake, my /usr/bin directory was being emptied to make space for the coreutils compilation process. Bricked my whole installation.
Now I’m smarter than four years ago as I mainly use NixOS.
Does anyone sell ‘Yes, Do As I Say!’ stickers?
You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.
it’s “Yes, do as I say!”
Dammit, my organic memory failed yet again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that prompt (and I have agreed to that as well at least few times).
Yeah OP is not gonna die on that
I overwrote my ssh private key with rsync. Fortunately I had special cron job running on my servers that updates ssh public keys on a server with ssh public keys from my github account, so I just had to upload a new key to the github and wait for a few hours.
Average .ml purges
congrats you’re ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or nixos
One of us. One of us
Nice day to move to nixos ;)
See my top-level comment; even if they’re ready for the complexity, it doesn’t protect you from a similar mistake!
OP mentioned having used Linux for 4 weeks. If they are interested in learning more about Linux, I feel like even Arch would be a better next step.
I love NixOS and have been using it for over a year at this point but sometimes when things don’t work I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. I’ve been using Linux for ~7 years now.
