Everything I know about bash I learned by spending a decade copy-pasting random commands I found online into my terminal.
It’s really that easy. You’ll be sudo apt update-ing with the best of them in no time when you spend a decade copy pasting commands you found on the web to your terminal.
True story - I keep blank audio CDs around because my cars have CD players. The fact that I still burn CDs is another story, but Debian is still small enough to fit on a CD-ROM. So I keep a backup of Debian 12 on a CD-ROM so I don’t have to lose a flash drive to that task. Very convenient. And I’ve broken my system a few times tinkering. I’m not even sure how. But hey, I love to go fast and break things. I probably made an edit to a file long ago and forgot about it and now it borked stuff. It happens.
At this stage, I’ve got it down pretty good. If I break my OS, I can plop in my boot CD, use rescue mode to back my home folder up to a flash drive and wipe the system. I keep lots of other things on extra HDDs so all I ever wipe is my boot SSD. I have an Nvidia GPU so before I log in for the first time, I just get back into rescue mode and set up my root password, user account and password, reclaim my home folder, change ownership to the new account, set up fstab, and install drivers and programs before ever logging in as my user for the first time - all from the console.
As for data loss, I haven’t lost any. I have never needed to wipe my hard drives so as long as my home folder is intact, retrieving that is easy enough. I don’t keep just one copy of irreplaceable files, either. While my phone does back up my stuff to Google Drive, I keep additional copies of my favorite pictures and videos on DVDs. Three copies, on at least two different media, one of them off-site.
Breaking your OS is really not that big of a deal once you know how to retrieve stuff without it. You don’t even need CDs lol The boot CD is just for convenience. You can bork the system on a computer with just one storage device and as long as you have two flash drives, you can get it all back pretty easy.
But I’m only here after years of experience in bash. If I went back ten years with a busted laptop and told my 22 year old self to use lsblk, mount, and cp to copy the home directory to a removable device all in command line, younger me would probably cry lol
Everything I know about bash I learned by spending a decade copy-pasting random commands I found online into my terminal.
It’s really that easy. You’ll be sudo apt update-ing with the best of them in no time when you spend a decade copy pasting commands you found on the web to your terminal.
And, in the meantime, you’ll only destroy your OS maybe a few dozen times!
True story - I keep blank audio CDs around because my cars have CD players. The fact that I still burn CDs is another story, but Debian is still small enough to fit on a CD-ROM. So I keep a backup of Debian 12 on a CD-ROM so I don’t have to lose a flash drive to that task. Very convenient. And I’ve broken my system a few times tinkering. I’m not even sure how. But hey, I love to go fast and break things. I probably made an edit to a file long ago and forgot about it and now it borked stuff. It happens.
At this stage, I’ve got it down pretty good. If I break my OS, I can plop in my boot CD, use rescue mode to back my home folder up to a flash drive and wipe the system. I keep lots of other things on extra HDDs so all I ever wipe is my boot SSD. I have an Nvidia GPU so before I log in for the first time, I just get back into rescue mode and set up my root password, user account and password, reclaim my home folder, change ownership to the new account, set up fstab, and install drivers and programs before ever logging in as my user for the first time - all from the console.
As for data loss, I haven’t lost any. I have never needed to wipe my hard drives so as long as my home folder is intact, retrieving that is easy enough. I don’t keep just one copy of irreplaceable files, either. While my phone does back up my stuff to Google Drive, I keep additional copies of my favorite pictures and videos on DVDs. Three copies, on at least two different media, one of them off-site.
Breaking your OS is really not that big of a deal once you know how to retrieve stuff without it. You don’t even need CDs lol The boot CD is just for convenience. You can bork the system on a computer with just one storage device and as long as you have two flash drives, you can get it all back pretty easy.
But I’m only here after years of experience in bash. If I went back ten years with a busted laptop and told my 22 year old self to use lsblk, mount, and cp to copy the home directory to a removable device all in command line, younger me would probably cry lol
As the other comment said, not OS friendly XD