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?

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
    2·
    10 minutes ago

    Last week I accidentally overwrite my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don’t, that file contains a description of your entire system – all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.

    I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that’s not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn’t that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.

  • the_q@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    6·
    6 hours ago

    If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    If you don’t mess with the partitions during the install and don’t format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      1·
      5 hours ago

      make sure not to reformat though. it can be a problem depending on the installer his distro uses.

      i think its safer to just save the home folder, and replace it later when the system is installed.

  • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    27·
    11 hours ago

    My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.

  • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    7 hours ago

    Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?

    Yes, but you might have to muck around with /etc/fstab. The reason is because when you install to your root partition, the installer will create a new /home in that root partition. (Unless you have an installer that’s smart enough that you can tell it otherwise.)

    You should be able to mount the partition in any case, but to have the system recognize it as /home it has to be properly set up in fstab.

    • Zangoose@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 hours ago

      OP mentioned having used Linux for 4 weeks. If they are interested in learning more about Linux, I feel like even Arch would be a better next step.

      I love NixOS and have been using it for over a year at this point but sometimes when things don’t work I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. I’ve been using Linux for ~7 years now.

  • GNUmer@sopuli.xyz
    8·
    10 hours ago

    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.

  • JustPedro@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    8 hours ago

    I overwrote my ssh private key with rsync. Fortunately I had special cron job running on my servers that updates ssh public keys on a server with ssh public keys from my github account, so I just had to upload a new key to the github and wait for a few hours.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    Does anyone sell ‘Yes, Do As I Say!’ stickers?

    You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.

  • Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    8 hours ago

    My pacman -Syu crashed on my old laptop and at this point I might just reinstall it, this time putting on some sort of a snapshot solution on it like on my main laptop

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    4·
    12 hours ago

    FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the “weird” steps.