That looks like it's designed to strike terror into the souls of any mortals who witness it...
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You say you're no power-user... this is a LOT of fixing shit, especially on your first day!! NICE.
-- Frost
I think people say it, probably because they got sick of people asking what distro to choose.
Which I mean, I'm not a stranger to people saying careless things out of frustration, but... I still find saying it very reckless.
Easy, just select the one that says GRU8
Let me ask you, were you perhaps using the plugin that allows you to use Wallpaper Engine in KDE?
Because I have had the same thing happen to me many times because apparently a lot of the various backgrounds I used to use in Windows just straight up break something after a while.
You described a process I have been through too many times ha.
Not just that it's less "stable", it's that there is a steeper learning curve. Arch based distros have all the guard rails pulled off. People that try to help you generally expect/assume you have experience which is a big reason it's not starter friendly.
Arch/easyArch distros have excellent documentation which is often it's greatest strength.
That said some people are more capable/tenacious then others when it comes to research. It's no minor feat you brought your computer back from the brink. When I was starting out I nuked and reinstalled for less. You gave yourself a good crash course and learned a lot more about how your OS works in the process. This experience gave you a foundation you'll take with you to whatever comes next, even if it's another distro.
EndeavourOS is a great distro ! If i can give you some advice from noob to noob... If anytime an update breaks your system go check their forum !
There was an update a few months ago that broke my system and made it unbootable ! The root cause was the nouveau GPU driver which was easily fixed after a few days or by installing the nvidia proprietary drivers.
If i had checked the forum It would have avoided a fresh install !
Have fun :)
My first adventure in Linux, back in the early noughties:
I think I just reinstalled, I can't remember.
Thanks! After browsing the forums and not finding the precise solution to my particular problem (and the solutions I found ended up not being right for my situation), and also realizing that the forums assume you know how to do basic things like access your terminal from a frozen desktop, edit the kernel options, etc.; and after despairing when my computer was trying to boot from the wrong SSD because I touched the wrong thing in UEFI trying to find said kernel options, and I couldn't figure out how to get back to UEFI to fix it, I ended up using Lumo to walk me through the process. It feels like a dirty secret though, cause I know how people feel about LLMs and I'm aware of some of the issues, but I made sure to double-check everything it recommended.
Details:
At first it tried to wayyy over-engineer a solution, but after some more prompting it told me that I could just press f2 at startup to get back to UEFI to boot from the correct drive. And then after that worked, it helped me get to my terminal from my frozen desktop. Then it walked me through the steps that I found on the forum, and when that didn't work it helped me troubleshoot, told me how to view my system logs and look for errors, and explained how to rollback my version of plasma from my system cache.
When that still didn't work, and I tried successfully to log in to my guest account, it told me that it means the problem is in my main user configs. So it told me how to back those up and move them, and how to restart the plasma shell to create new defaults. And that's what finally worked!
Then I logged in and the only thing missing were my toolbar icons, so it told me where to find them in my config backups, and how to paste them into the correct line of my current config files, and reset the plasma shell again. It worked like a charm.
I wouldn't give it autonomous control of my system, cause the first "solution" it proposed was to unmount and remount the drives, actually physically removing them and resetting them, wipe everything and repartition/re-encrypt, then reinstall from a live USB. Like, fuck that. All I had to do was press f2 to get back to UEFI...
Boringly reliable sounds wonderful to me. I don't know why I chose an Arch-based distro 😵
That sounds tragic!
I'm definitely not going to try reformatting my boot partition. The closest thing might be trying to change the encryption key, but I think there's some FOSS software out there that can help do that (if Seahorse works on Arch-based distros, at least).
I don't plan to even touch my main OS drive beyond that, at least not at at the system-level. I've got a whole extra SSD to play around with once I learn how to mount it, and I'm even nervous about partitioning and encrypting that! I have no clue if it'll be sufficiently sandboxed away from my main drive, but I'll have to read about that before I get started.
Yes, that's exactly what happened!
Thankfully it was a simple fix once I figured out what I needed to do (and where I needed to go to do it!)
Now today I'll find out if I can harden my system's security without bricking it! (Encrypting swap space, password-protecting UEFI, mounting and encrypting my spare SSD, etc... (maybe enabling secure boot and locking the bootloader if that's necessary; I'm still gonna read about it a bunch before I make a decision, and I'll definitely back everything up on an external drive before I even try).
Is that a joke? I know this is only my second day on Linux, but even I know that doesn't sound correct...
Hahaha, thanks!
Psst, here's an embarrassing secret:I ended up using Lumo to walk me through the steps after despairing when my system wouldn't boot. I had been using the forums but they seemed to assume a certain baseline level of knowledge, like "go here and paste this," but I didn't even know how to get to a terminal with a frozen desktop, or what commands to run to get to the place where I needed to paste stuff. Things like that.
Lumo explained every step, and even though it was a bit confused at first (at first it wanted me to physically remove my SSD and reset it, then wipe everything and reinstall!), I was able to talk it down from the ledge until it finally just told me "Oh yeah, you can press f2 at startup to get back to UEFI without decrypting." Like, thanks... I guess...
And then when I got back into my system and was in the terminal, I looked up all the commands it told me to run before running them so I knew what they would do. Things like nano, journalctl, lsblk, tar, mkdir, etc. I already knew what sudo and pacman do.
But overall, my problem was too specific and the solutions I had found in the forums, even if I understood them, ended up not applying because the parameter I was supposed to paste somewhere in the kernel options ended up already being there when I finally figured out how to get there. And I just didn't have the level of basic knowledge it would've taken to simply follow the advice in the forums without expanding a whole rabbit hole skills tree of basic tutorials, all while panicking and thinking most of it looked like gibberish anyway.
So I don't regret my decision, because ultimately it worked. I get the dangers of using AI and vibe-coding, but I double-checked everything before running because I'm not an idiot. Also, Lumo generally seems better at programming than other LLMs. Probably because it isn't designed by a greedy and corrupt, power-hungry and profit-driven american corporation, so it avoids enshittification. I'm not evangelizing, just relating my experience.
OpenSuse is great if you want up to date and reliable. It's quite boring how reliable it is. Great if that is your preference. If you like learning and chaos, Arch is useful.
I'm finding that out now, but it's a trial by fire. I heard it was beginner-friendly but I guess anything based on Arch is gonna be less stable...
Yeah, I originally wanted to try something Debian-based for starters before branching out to other distros. I was deadset on Zorin for a while, but the more I learned about Ubuntu the less I wanted to use anything forked from it.
Maybe I should have gone with LMDE or Sparky, but live and learn.
And I do have a bootable copy of my OS on a live USB! My laptop came with one cause it shipped with Linux already installed.
Yeah, now I understand something I read a while back: "If you want to learn linux, break your system and then figure out how to fix it."
After my experience, I wouldn't exactly recommend this. But it did work!
I called it: "involuntarily learning"
It makes sense if that works for you, but I certainly wasn't trying to make it Windows. When I powered it up the first time I was enraptured with the user experience. Everything seemed so sleek and just downright sensical!
I could find all my settings and various menus without cursing the mothers of whoever designed it. So that's already in a different league from windows!
Didn't stop "all my issues" from disappearing. Like I said, it was a KDE update which broke it. If it happens again I'll try a more stable desktop environment.
I have AMD CPU/GPU
I'd like to try OpenSuse though. I have a list of others to try, but I'll wait until I establish a decent baseline on this one first
Thank you!
People don't appreciate that the silver lining of LLMs is Linux suddenly being user friendly, which will bring the community so many new users
I would tell those some people to talk about things of which they know.
Definitely always a good thing to have. You could even save someone else's computer, even if it isn't Linux.
I can't relate as I've been on Linux for almost two decades, so out of curiosity: when going from Windows to Linux, what would that figurative square peg in a round hole (which I think you meant) look like in the literal sense? What do you do to try and make Linux into Windows, that actually breaks your Linux installation?