It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.

If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<

Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?

Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.

Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.

All you need is a bootable usb stick

Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.

I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.

Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy

To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren't counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol

I unironically keep a tiny linux mint boot usb key on my keychain.

When I feel bad about myself, I remember that I have that on my keychain, and I think I can't be that much of a failure because that's pretty cool.

Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.

Commonly referred to as a "smartphone"

Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.

You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.

Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody's installing MacOS anyway.

I reckon it's because you can't resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS

I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.

I've been using linux since last December and I haven't majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?

openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.

I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.

Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P

Tbf this would be the same on windows (well, if there was a fix other than reinstall...), unless you just already know the fix, which then would be the same on linux, you just don't know it yet.

Besides, since windows only fix would be to reinstall, no second pc needed, just keep the installation drive and treat it like a windows reinstall, bam same same.

That's what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can't switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It's rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I'm sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.

A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough

To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.

learning that most people didn't have a "back up computer" was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT

asdf

This is true for any OS. If it's not working you can't use it to look up how to fix it. That's not unique to Linux.

Just use Tumbleweed or Fedora...or any other distro with amazing brtfs support.

That alone has saved me from myself more times than I want to mention.

Do you guys not have phones?