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.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it’s a conf file for Xorg… but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn’t, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
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.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
You’re underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there…
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn’t threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
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.
This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.
I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I’d say don’t laugh but I still do.
Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
It’s definitely something you should have lying around for exactly this kind of contingency. That goes for Windows too, btw. Windows installations also get borked and having a Linux live system available can be a life saver.
