From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
dd is nicknamed 'disk destroyer' for good reason.😵💫 the 3am tinkering, it calls to me 😵💫
Never dd at 3am, kids.
I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that's actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I'm sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
dd'ed an ISO onto the system drive instead of a USB stick. Luckily, the first partition was the Windows one, so not too important; and the rest I recovered from the GPT backup table.
Nice! I need to learn recovery methods. I am so used to scorch earthing an install when it goes wrong, which is not useful.
Before you perform another task on that hard drive, try photorec. You might be able to get a majority of your files back if they're important
I guess I can try it, since I did not like, wipe everything.
Expecting things to be different.
The differences do seem enormous when one first encounters linux. They shrink every install though, but it takes some time for the magic to wear off.
The first dumb thing is distro hopping to start with.
Distro are not that different in practice, just pick one and go on with your life.
Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)
Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves
NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others
NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference
Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled