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?
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.
My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.
“AI is gonna take over the world”
Grub: “Hold ma beer”
congrats you’re ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or 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!”
Yeah OP is not gonna die on that
FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the “weird” steps.
I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits
TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.
Yup, its super easy
ctrl + z
One of us. One of us
On the bright side, it’s never been a better time to switch to an immutable distro…
(it was nvidia related)
lel we got 'im, boys. /s
If anything can be salvaged, I’d suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don’t come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I’d recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)
I’ve done the same thing (Nvidia related) on a machine hooked up to an expensive scientific instrument. Didn’t get any other work done that day… Ugh.
I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.
Migrating a 8 year old server to fresh new hardware. Can’t believe you can basically just rsync one computer to another
