After a month of fighting Linux after decades of Windows sysadmin work, I learned the key to prevent fucking up Linux is to stop trying to make it into Windows! As soon as I stopped trying to smash a round peg in that square hole, all my issues disappeared and I could enjoy learning something new again!

You've riled the luddites.

Yeah, I use it as a "downsing rod" as well. Points me in the right direction, but I still prefer verifying stuff myself by going to the proper pages. It's often I find out that the LLM is just plain wrong.

I only ever got that stuff with Manjaro and Nvidia.

Mint and OpenSuse have been real reliable. Same with Kubuntu.

Don't use LLM for this, they will mix up answers from different tools and worst case you will break even more things.

Archwiki is a good start even if you are using a different distro.

It's great at pointing you in the correct direction. As a Linux newbie myself, I've been through similar things as OP and used llms to help me debug the issues, but almost every time it suggested something a bit more complex than your average command, it was wrong. Luckily, I never trusted the output from the llms, but it got me so far, that I knew what to search for in forums and then get the right solution.

Yep... My first day like a year ago(?), I deleted my bootloader. Thought I had nuked both my Windows (which I needed for work) and my bazzite drives.

Turns out I'm just a fucking moron (thank God) for trying to reclaim some storage space by formatting the boot partition.. didn't even think about what I was doing at the time I guess. Anyway, I managed to salvage it by putting windows on a USB, then running some command I found on a 12 year old post on a French website in the windows terminal. I was so close to just reformatting and reinstalling everything, which was largely recommended after trying various commands without success.

I still have no bloody what I'm doing these days on Linux, but at least it's fun to tinker and learn and I feel like I can ram my head against most issues until I figure it out.

Thanks for the read :) glad you were able to sort it out!

Looks like guerilla marketing

Some people would say there's no measurable difference between distros, though.

This noob rocked It though! They went from zero to hero using only willpower and a search engine.

This is the way

Yeah! The first thing I learned with linux is that you can break it really badly (don't mess with the bootloader unless you have a spare computer or live-system in a flash drive and some free time, same applies to networking). The second thing you learn is that by breaking things and trying to fix them you'll learn a lot, especially about which tools give you which information from the system for diagnostics.

So, you essentially got your initiation ritual right! Welcome to linux!

Endeavour’s probably a lot for someone new to Linux.

Well done, its feels good making a graceful recovery like that. Grub is a bit underbaked as a recovery environment I think. I've always stuck to fairly vanilla distros like Mint since Linux is my main OS and performance is less important to me vs stability. I've also found having a bootable Linux USB in a drawer has saved me a few times when testing new things.

Welcome to Linux

It's Xfce's default file manager. I guess that means that OP is actually using Zorin OS Lite.

I'm using ZorinOS

hmmm this always worked ootb for me on gnome- and kde-environments. what distro is using thunar?

oooooooo... I should try it.

EDIT : for others, you might need to set up/enable terminal bell

Fighting Time Blindness one chime at a time.

I feel so seen 🥲, thank you so much. I'm happy it helped you, thank you for letting me know it's useful to you.

I've had to up it to once every 10, and I'm considering lowering it to 5 or 6, and changing the case statement to be a division/modulus calcuation.

There's various sound effects on https://www.myinstants.com/ , I'm using one of the airhorn sounds from there 🙈

I remember echo -e "\a"

Hey, just wanted to mention I finally got around to this bookmark and implemented it on my system. Works great so far, I just need a cleaner sound because the chime I found is kinda noisy.

Thanks for this post.

Fighting Time Blindness one chime at a time.

No more of this Thunar calculating the file size for minutes/hours on bigger files. I’m talking 2-3 seconds on PCMan. It blinked just a few times, and then done.

I don't use either, but suspect that you may have checked the size of a directory in the first case, and of a file in the latter. Or possibly checked a tree first with one and second with the other, after data had been read from disk and cached in memory.

It's normally a very quick operation to get the size of a single file on Linux, no matter how large. Internally, a program will call some stat() variant, like fstatat() or something. That's immediately available.

However, there isn't a normal way to obtain the size of a whole tree of files without examining each. Hypothetically, there could be some special filesystem that maintained a size computation and had some special, filesystem-specific operation, but I don't know of any off the top of my head; it's not accessible via the standard Unix file API. So a utility will normally need to traverse the whole tree and check each file's size to get a total.

I guess hypothetically one could write a utility that did that walk of a tree more-slowly than another, but a utility trying to compute size would need to do pretty much the same thing.

If you can still switch to the console, then check dmesg and/or journalctl -eb for any issues. But this at least tells you the system itself is not frozen. The kernel still works.

I would try to restart your login manager/desktop environment and see if that brings you back to a working desktop. If so then it sounds like a software bug in your DE. You could try switching to a different one and see if that helps anything. As a last resort you could also try a completely different Linux distro.