Well I guess I didn’t really break it. A KDE update broke it. After updating I rebooted, and then when I tried to log in, the screen went black and got stuck like that.
Anyway, I read on the forums that the fixed involved adding a parameter to some line in the kernel options, which I had no clue how to do. I also didn’t know I could enter the terminal from a frozen screen. So I tried the grub menu. But I didn’t know what I was doing and was scared to mess things up, and for some reason I thought the answer was in the UEFI screen.
Now I knew that I was treading in dangerous waters, so I was trying not to touch anything while poking around the menus trying to figure out where I needed to go. But apparently I touched something I wasn’t supposed to, cause my computer tried booting from the spare SSD, which isn’t mounted yet and don’t know how to decrypt it. So I got stuck for a while, tried the grub rescue in the command line because it was the only option I seemed to have, didn’t understand it, panicked for a while, and eventually found out I could press f2 on startup to go straight to the UEFI screen. So then I went back to the menu where I messed things up and made sure to click on the correct disk.
So I was quite relieved when I was able to decrypt it and it brought me back to the Endeavour grub menu (the purple screen), and then booted up as it was supposed to. I tried logging in again and it still froze, but at this point I had learned I could press some hotkeys to get to the terminal. So I went in there and followed some instructions I found, ultimately only really learning what the problem wasn’t. It turns out the parameter I was supposed to add to fix the issue was already there!
So I found out how to revert kde desktop and workspace to a previous version from the cache, and I did that, but when I rebooted and tried logging in again it still froze.
Luckily I had previously made a guest account so I logged in there and it worked. So then I learned that that means the issue was in the user-level configurations.
So I followed some more instructions to back up my KDE configs, moved the existing ones to somewhere else, then killed and restarted plasmashell to create new default config files.
And then I tried logging in, and it worked! This was an hours-long process, so it definitely felt good to have a working system again.
Luckily most of my settings and my favorited items in the app launcher were still intact. I hadn’t moved my global shortcuts config file either, so my keybindings were preserved. The only things missing were my pinned icons on the app manager toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
So I went into my backup file for the plasma appletsrc configs, and I found the line that listed the apps I had pinned, and I copied it and used nano to paste into the current version in same place it would have been.
So even though it was tragic and frustrating and a bit gut-wrenching at times, I learned a LOT today. I gained some familiarity with grub, UEFI, terminal, basic shell commands, restoring previous versions of software from the cache, logging and troubleshooting, backups, configurations, and the basic system architectures, and the anatomy of the KDE environment.
I’m still no power user, and I still have a lot to learn, but I came a long way in just one day. Now, I’m tired.
There’s lots more to set up tomorrow, but at least walking into it I won’t feel so lost!
You say you’re no power-user… this is a LOT of fixing shit, especially on your first day!! NICE.
– Frost
It won’t be long before I’m wearing thigh-highs and cat ears 😎
My first adventure in Linux, back in the early noughties:
I think I just reinstalled, I can’t remember.
That looks like it’s designed to strike terror into the souls of any mortals who witness it…
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 that I’m aware of. Only if it was enabled by default, I mean. Or if I enabled it accidentally. I still have the default wallpaper, which is a high-res image of Ganymede.
Now that you mention it though, I did click on something that said “download more EndeavourOS wallpapers” in the welcome window after updating everything and before rebooting (when the problem started).
It ran a script, looked like it was downloading something, but I couldn’t find whatever it was after it finished. There certainly aren’t more wallpapers in any folder I can find. I don’t think the official OS would show me an option to download malware right on their welcome screen, but maybe there was a corrupted file or something…
Yeah, no, you have to go out of your way to choose something to work with Wallpaper Engine which is a paid Steam app and you have to choose the Steam app folder it exists in and such, so I doubt it had anything to do with that specifically.
You’re probably right that it was some other desktop setting that borked it, who knows what, honestly. Could have been any number of things. It definitely wouldn’t have been from just standard wallpapers, especially if you hadn’t actually changed the wallpaper.
Anyway, yeah, if you ever get a hankering to use Wallpaper Engine, be careful which wallpapers you choose in KDE or you’ll end up going through the same process all over again.
This is the way
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”
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 :)
Yeah, I’m liking it so far! Although I still don’t know enough to know what’s Endeavor and what’s KDE, but the two seem to work well together. You know… except for when they don’t…
I did check the forum when I had my issue and I found some posts from as recently as a month ago saying it was the KDE update that did it. So people suggested some tweaks to the kernel options, which I didn’t know how to do yet (which was how I ended up breaking my system further before fixing it).
But it turns out that wasn’t the issue for me, because when I finally found the place where I was supposed to add the parameter, it was already there!
I ended up just rolling back to a previous version of KDE from my cache, and then backing up my config files and moving them to a different folder so that restarting plasma generated new defaults, and voila!
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!
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 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?
Good on you for sticking with it and solving your problems. But damn, what a nightmarish experience for a first time user.
Thanks! Yeah, I was so distraught when I couldn’t boot it 😵 it felt so good to get it working again, though!
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.
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.
Definitely always a good thing to have. You could even save someone else’s computer, even if it isn’t Linux.
Endeavour’s probably a lot for someone new to Linux.
This noob rocked It though! They went from zero to hero using only willpower and a search engine.
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.~
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…
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.
I see. That makes sense. It really has felt a lot like having no guard rails, now that you mention it.
It’s no minor feat you brought your computer back from the brink.
Aw, well now I’m just flattered! Don’t let this go to my head. Now I see why Arch users are known for their hubris 😅
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.
I can’t wait to spin up a few VMs and try more distros and desktop environments! Play around with different inits and file systems, maybe try a distro with musl and busybox for c lib and coreutils, even something with the linux-libre kernel. I won’t truly understand what each component of the operating system does until I’ve isolated variables and tried multiple kinds of each.
I’m really enjoying it so far. There’s so much to learn, but instead of feeling overwhelmed I’m excited about all the possibilities ahead.
Ahh, recursive backup, fun, at least you caught it early, might not have if you weren’t paying attention.
I like reading your adventures. Reminds me of all the times I cried out “FUCK, what now?”… And I still do on occasion.
Security tomorrow. Maybe I should finally setup secure boot and look into tpm. Been putting that off for a good while now.
Glad your rolling with the punches!
Some people would say there’s no measurable difference between distros, though.
I would tell those some people to talk about things of which they know.
Is that a joke? I know this is only my second day on Linux, but even I know that doesn’t sound correct…
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.
I’ve found myself saying “I should’ve chosen LMDE” multiple times these past couple days, but ultimately there’s no replacement for the learning I was forced into by breaking my system.
I wonder if I would have learned anything at all if I chose LMDE or Zorin, or if I would’ve never had to fix my system and just done everything through the GUI. Ahh, the bliss of ignorance, once lost can never be regained…
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!
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).
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!
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.
I only ever got that stuff with Manjaro and Nvidia.
Mint and OpenSuse have been real reliable. Same with Kubuntu.
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
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.
Boringly reliable sounds wonderful to me. I don’t know why I chose an Arch-based distro 😵
Welcome to Linux
Thank you!
Well done you! And sorry you had to go through that. Remember that we now have LLMs to our disposal which are a godsend for fixing Linux if you ever feel lost
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.
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…
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.
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.
You’ve riled the luddites.
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
