Reading comments, it’s soo strange that I never borked my system once during nearly 7 years of linux usage. Playing games were frustrating, but it was improved a lot by now. My ubuntu never failed to boot, the only audio problem I had was with the mic. Even better, KDE Connect introduced new workflow to me. I wonder why my computer always boots well even when it gets borked during shutdown…
Nowadays, I use my own hand-rolled DE. It still refuses to break on me. Guess I am really lucky or something.
I’ve borked my system a few times, but I know it was always because I messed with stuff that I didn’t understand. My system is much more stable now that I learned those early lessons.
Opensuse is great. Yast was more useful than I initially thought.
On a different note - For people who like tinkering, nixos can also be a great option, it also allows rollbacks but doesn’t use BTRFS snapshots out of the box like opensuse.
The general community is probably going to catch any issues that pop up extremely quickly. Like my main machines are all on whitelist firewalls residing on external devices. If any software tries to make odd connections, the connections will get dropped and logged. I wouldn’t hesitate to report anything odd. I don’t run sketchy proprietary junk for the most part.
Sadly, I can’t help you there, but I must applaud to your attitude of figuring out what happend and why.
When reading forum posts about Windows, Android or iOS stuff, it’s infuriatingly common to find a list of potential fixes without any explanations. Many people don’t know what went wrong, or why, but they do have some ideas what might fix it. Unfortunately, they just can’t tell you why a particular action is supposed to fix anything, because they don’t understand the root causes.
Learning cli tools takes time. My advice: don’t do anything unless you are %100 sure what you are doing or you know how to revert whatever you did. When I first started using Linux I used to mess everything up by trying to solve my problems copy-pasting commands blindly. But in time I wanted to know what those commands were are, what each argument did etc. Apart from the cli tools, one can still mess things up with GUI apps if you edit system files blindly. Now this happens for people who want to dive a bit deeper. If you want a less risky swim, there are immutable distros where it’s less likely to break things.
I still keep track of what I install and what I change on my system. That helps a lot too.
You could install the linux-lts kernel alongside the one you have already installed to have the option to just boot into that one when a kernel update seems to be the problem.
Another thing would be to look into backup solutions that execute automatically when updating your system. Personally I have my system on BTRFS subvolumes and a package called snapper to manage the snapshots (backups). Alternatively the package timeshift gets mentioned a lot when discussing backup solutions.
Otherwise you did exactly what I have done to fix almost every issue I ever had. Downgrading the likely culprit and updating again a bit later.
I second btrfs with snapper. With snapper, you can set it up so that it automatically makes snapshots at a timed interval and/or when you run your package manager. You can restore any of your saved snapshots from the snapper app or even from GRUB.
It’s a bit hard to set up, but some distros come with it set up by default. You could install one if you don’t want to figure btrfs setup out and are open to OS hopping. OP, you mentioned you’re using arch, Garuda OS is an Arch based distro that comes with btrfs and the grub snapper configurations set up by default.
That was my first distro… in 1993! Because I bought a book with a CD in the back that had the whole thing instead of having to download a bunch of floppies!
I dunno, why would anyone be frustrated by having everything labeled with an incomprehensible acronym and an entirely unique and often vague directory structure with a stringent yet useless file level security?
Linux is amazing for it’s ability to be customized. That comes with a cost in on ramping new users. Hell, I’m an old user, and what I know is half useless because it’s so old. The end result is that I use linux to run a raspberry pi that shares out instrument data. And that’s all it does. It’s not a desktop, it’s a tool that does a thing. It does that one thing reasonably well, and I don’t have to screw with it. Because I never update it, never connect it to the internet, never install new things. Until I make a new one to do a new thing.
Honestly I have no idea why anyone would want a linux desktop for daily use. It’s nice to have an environment to set up the device for what it’s going to be doing. But beyond that, it’s usually not even going to have a monitor attached to it.
I’m looking forward to owning my computer, especially as Microsoft claws away more of my rights season by season. But WTF am I getting myself into when I make the jump? Is it possible to own my computer and have an easy to understand OS?
I hope I’m not fucking myself when I try to make the switch, but when the first response to it’s got problems is don’t look a gift horse in the mouth then yeah, it makes me a bit worried I’m going to be left out in the elements on my own by a community with the attitude of COD gamers.
I believe it is possible to have an easy-to-understand OS, it all really depends on your choice of distro and desktop environment. I would recommend downloading a distro that comes pre-installed with the desktop environment you prefer (you can install other desktops after the fact, but a preloaded “spin” of a distro will make things easy to understand at first.)
I think the ‘toxicity’ of the linux community is, in my experience anyways, totally overblown. Yes, if you post a question you might get a few snarky, entitled responses, but thats the same for any community. For every troll there are many more people willing to help you out.
For an easy start on Linux, I would recommend a “beginner” distro such as:
Example: <distro name> (<desktop environment>)
Linux Mint (Cinnamon)
Ubuntu (GNOME)
Kubuntu (KDE)
I think new users are often intimidated by how much there is to learn about Linux, but I assure you all of that will come with time. Some people also fear using the terminal, but I would strongly suggest learning how to at least:
Update your system
Install / remove / search for packages
from the terminal.
I hope that answers some questions, if not or I just confused you more, ask as many questions of me as you need.
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