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I'm on my second install now. I fucked up the first one pretty handily by accidentally wiping the boot partition in gparted. (Like a complete idiot, because the partitions are labeled.)
I would actually be amazed if I ever bricked a PC fucking around with installing software to it. At the very worst, I might have to move a jumper pin to flash the CMOS and start fresh like I never even touched the thing. If somehow even that fails, it would be a unique experience.
Not sure you can fully brick a PC. Simple BIOS update and your back to scratch load an OS and go again. Hardware failure. That's where the bricking happens.
Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
Ah, have you found the land of IoT? Bricks everywhere, you'd love it.
You're suggesting I should follow the yellow brick road to find the Wizard of iOT?
Why not... or try another brick in the wall
Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.
What about Rsync. Does it get love? Any snapshot is good if it works. Backups are the shit.
Snapshots let you very easily revert back to an older snapshot. They're relatively fast and lightweight.
You should have offsite backups too. Snapshots won't help if your computer catches fire, gets stolen, etc. Rsync is okay, but has a bunch of downsides:
- It only gives you a single copy.
- If the source data gets corrupted, the backup copy will also get corrupted.
- It's not safe from ransomware since the client has full write access to the rsync backup (and thus malicious code could delete the backup).
A backup solution like Borgbackup + borgmatic or restic is a better solution and solves the above issues:
- You can easily take daily backups - all the data is deduplicated so it won't take much more space (assuming you're not changing every file every day).
- Multiple backups means that if newer data is corrupted, you can just pull files from an older backup.
- Borgmatic has an append-only mode that only allows a client to add new data to a backup, and not delete any old data. This prevents the client from being able to erase the backups
I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again
I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.
Of course that's after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it
Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.
I haven't had any issues with the kernel yet. The worst thing that I can remember doing is messing up the systemd boot entry on my Arch Linux install.
I learned by a lot of distro hopping, tweaking and tuning and compiling kernels (way back when tho), to not being afraid of "breaking things." Since Nov. 1992. It helps when you use a spare PC or laptop though, no panic about loss
I've never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.
Not any moreso than learning any other OS. I'd just argue that it's the case if you're averse to research, reading, listening, watching, or just generally learning from others... or if you're delving into unknown territory
Personally, i'm a learn-by-doing type of lady, so I've fucked up my share of devices (I'm allergic to reading unless it's fiction), but I have yet to mess around in the kernel (it's on my todo list, for my LFS build which is TBD)
I just spent 11 days on a dual boot repair in fstab, passwd, loads of ecryptfs, amongst other boot and login issues. Before restoring from the full system backup after getting mad to finally want to use my PC. 11 fucking days almost all day in terminal. TOO many partitions and too many folders inside of folders to get to my ecryptfs files. I got so lost LSing around.
After it all though, and it was an aneurism and a half. I still want to finish my goal and reinstall my dual boot this time correctly aiming the folders correctly.
Might help to draw it out on paper
But, when you're done, you'll be the Encrypted Dual-Boot God !
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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