I hear this is a rite of passage. I made it 4 weeks before I rekt all my shit (it was nvidia related). Where do I claim my sticker?
In all seriousness, now that I understand better these commands that I’ve been haphazardly throwing around, Id like to do a clean install. God knows what else Ive done to it. Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?
ctrl + z
Does anyone sell ‘Yes, Do As I Say!’ stickers?
You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.
it’s “Yes, do as I say!”
Dammit, my organic memory failed yet again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that prompt (and I have agreed to that as well at least few times).
Yeah OP is not gonna die on that
The best way to learn something is by hurting you.
If anything can be salvaged, I’d suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don’t come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I’d recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)
Try to fix it.
Recently upgraded a laptop that had been on the shelf for 5 years up to latest version. Flawless one-step upgrade! nixos. Things never get in a tangle where installing and uninstalling packages leaves random artifacts behind. If you saved it to version control, you can return to a past system configuration and the only thing different is your home directory data.
And yes, if you have a home partition and root partition, that’s exactly what you can do. That’s the beauty of that approach. But back it up!
Average .ml purges
If you don’t mess with the partitions during the install and don’t format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.
make sure not to reformat though. it can be a problem depending on the installer his distro uses.
i think its safer to just save the home folder, and replace it later when the system is installed.
What where some of the commands you where unsure of? Might be able to help if it’s a common problem like smb sharing.
I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.
If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.
I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits
(it was nvidia related)
lel we got 'im, boys. /s
FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the “weird” steps.
congrats you’re ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or nixos
