It’s not really broken, couldn’t get the microphone to work with any program

    • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
      311·
      6 months ago

      Ok. I’ve downloaded, tar and gunzipped the files for it.

      Then did a make build and then make install. Now my system won’t start. What do I do?

    • Sabata@ani.social
      3·
      6 months ago

      I have saved 3 reinstall or 1 week of troubleshooting in only 3 “fuck around and find out” incidents.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
        4·
        6 months ago

        Same, it’s saved my butt so many times. Once in the middle of a tech conference, I was messing around in the terminal with my networking and borked something really bad.

        I spent 5 minutes trying to get my networking back but couldn’t figure out what I had screwed up and ended up breaking it more.

        I just went into Timeshift and restored to the beginning of that day and in a few minutes I was back up like nothing had happened.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
    39·
    6 months ago

    In the olden days, I would have spent hours to fix it, completely forget everything I’ve done over the course of those several hours and then having to reinstall it bcs I’ve broken something else in those unsuccessful attempts and now dont have the energy to figure out this clusterfuck too.

    Ahh, good memories.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
        171·
        6 months ago

        That was a decade+ ago, closer to two.

        I’ve always had far more driver issues with Windows.
        I have a niche laptop that for mic & speakers doesn’t really have drivers for that exact ID and a close (working) match are ancient, so can’t avoid crackling sounds. No issues out of the box with Linux.

      • bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        6 months ago

        on a thread about someone having a weird issue with linux

        someone shares related story involving troubleshooting for hours

        “You’re really selling me on Linux. Sounds like a nightmare”

  • Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.socialEnglish
    38·
    6 months ago

    Got into an argument about this once. The other person insisted that if I wipe my hard drive and reinstall, that I’m a pathetic moron who doesn’t deserve to use a computer.

    In fairness, it’s usually better to fix things so you can learn, but dang they were toxic.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      To be fair, at least with Windows, if you do a reinstall I’ve always found that it never runs quite like it used to. I’ve sometimes had to deal with some weird quirks afterwards. A friend of mine who kept switching between Google Android and open-sourve Android on his phone said the same thing. Every time he reinstalled Google Android, it simply wouldn’t run as well as it did beforehand.

      It’s like taking a plumbing pipe out and putting it back in. Or taking apart a car engine and putting it back together. It never quite fits together the way it used to anymore.

      • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        101·
        6 months ago

        I had the opposite experience with Windows (7 up to 10), every now and then I would have to reinstall it to get some random feature working, which made the system run smoothly for a while - which checks out, considering Windows’ affinity for software rot.

        Then again, I increasingly debloated it as time went on, which I’d assume contributes to its instability.

    • jelloeater - Ops Mgr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      People like that are why more folks don’t like Linux and tech in general.

      Bro, gatekeeping computers is something children do.

      “You much get invited to a lot of parties?” is generally a good response. “Everyone makes mistakes, you’re living proof”.

  • spikederailed@lemmy.world
    36·
    6 months ago

    You learn plenty by breaking and reinstalling. I don’t considering it an invalid option for a home user. I had to reinstall MacOS7/8 and Windows 95/98 so many times as a kid. Learned a lot doing it, sysadmin now 🤷‍♂️

  • Allero@lemmy.today
    202·
    6 months ago

    Second approach is better as it teaches you to fix and understand the system you’re working with

    Of course, this is a more complicated and energy - demanding approach, though. But if you wanna stay on Linux, you better figure such stuff out, this will be invaluable in the long run.

    I should also mention that Debian, despite the Bookworm introducing more user-friendly options, is not a newbie-centered distribution and fixing things in there tend to be more tedious for an inexperienced user.

    The upside, however, is that once you’ve set it up, everything will just work. But first you might face some pain.

    • towerful@programming.dev
      6·
      6 months ago

      I wish there was a way to see what the default values in a config file are for a given distro.
      I’m guessing there probably is, and I just don’t know it.

      Maybe I should just make / a git repo…

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        Don’t modify the config in /etc/, copy them in ~/.config/ and then modify them. You’ll always be able to just look at the /etc/ for defaults.

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
        2·
        6 months ago

        Without knowing a better way, my go-to solution woukd just be getting an full installation image and diffing my files with the files on it

      • Hello Hotel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Usually if its a boolean or nullable, a good config file will have a # uncommemt this line to enable this feature/disable this feature/bind to this IP address/give this thing a name that is at least vaugely hints what the option does. But yes, its still fairly annoying.

      • barsquid@lemmy.world
        11·
        6 months ago

        You should check out the Fedora atomic distros if you haven’t already. Making the system work more like a git repo is what they are doing with rpm-ostree. I am liking it a lot.

  • teft@lemmy.world
    16·
    6 months ago

    Pffft. I just boot from a live cd so changes are gone at reboot. Why install if you’re just going to break something?

  • Plopp@lemmy.world
    11·
    6 months ago

    There’s a cheat button called sudo snapper rollback in OpenSUSE, it can be had in other distros as well.

  • SeekPie@lemm.ee
    7·
    6 months ago

    Yesterday I tried to format and encrypt a usb drive, accidentally encrypted the main drive and it wouldn’t boot to a snapshot before that. Decided to go for EndevourOS (Arch BTW) instead of Tumbleweed because I found Tumbleweeds installer too complicated.