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That’s really true for any OS. There’s always a helpful friend’s computer or your phone.
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.
Forgive my dumb ass for asking an easily googleable question;
What is tty?
TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don’t boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,…7, depending on which F key you pressed) You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
Oooh! I see, thank you!
Yesterday, I tried booting into Wayland on Linux Mint, and I got NOTHING.
I rebooted and got nothing again. I tried the Ctrl+alt+F(x) key combo, but that didn’t work either. From your explanation, it sounds like I should’ve been able to at least get a terminal for that, but it didn’t seem to work. Could that be because graphically, it WAS displaying something after all?
Ended up unplugging the screens from the GPU and tried plugging it straight into the mobo instead, and it ended up working after all.
Hmm… What does nothing mean exactly? Did your monitor turn on during boot? If so, did it turn off again at some point or did it display a completely black image?
Since the mobo connection worked (which usually uses the integrated GPU chip on your CPU as far as I know), maybe it was an issue with your gpu? Or the connector or something?
I once had a broken setup where got stuck on a black screen, unable to switch to a tty. If I started spamming CTRL+ALT+Fsomething right after Grub was done, I managed to escape the black screen before it appeared, maybe you could try spamming the key combo early on and see if that opens a tty for you. If that is the case then you can be pretty certain that the problem is related to your desktop environment.
Alright, I’ve managed to open the TTY when trying to boot into Mint(wayland). You were right! It’s probably an issue with my nvidia drivers. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks
Nice! Since your installation is showing similar symptoms to my installation when I updated my nvidia drivers a while ago, I’m just gonna tell you how I fixed my issue on my computer, and maybe it’s gonna work for you too. If you want, you can try this:
Boot your PC. After your Motherboard is done showing its logo or whatever it shows, you should see grub. If you press ‘e’ before grub proceeds to boot into linux, you will be thrown into a simple editor that will let you temporarily change what grub boots. There is a line with the kernel image and arguments, it probably starts with ‘linux’. Go to the end of the line (line might span multiple rows, so end of line might be on the next row) and add this:
nvidia_drm.fbdev=0
Then press F10 to boot. That’s it.
This fixed the issue for me. If it will fix the issue for you as well, you can consider adding it to your kernel parameters permanently or making sure the nvidia kernel module gets the parameter by other means.
Hope this helps!
Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It’s been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.
I am a teacher by trade, so I absolutely love helping others. I’ll absolutely pass it forward! This is also how you build a healthy community, I think :D
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.
This was true for Windows as well.
Nah now you just switch to a TTY with a bunch of sick Rust terminal tools, or if its really borked you boot into recovery mode and mount the old filesystem and do magic spells at the filesystem until it works.
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.
Lmao. I thought I was the only one. I have like 5 USB sticks with 5 different distros on them all tested and working. I also have a laptop with bazziteOS so the chance of it breaking to no return is very slim. That way, I can fix my desktop if it breaks.
Have you heard about Ventoy? You can have 1 pendrive with all the ISO-s you would want. Currently i have like 10 distros on my thumbdrive.
Plus you could use the pendrive as a regular storage as well besides the ISOs.
I have that, too, but I don’t have a USB with more than 32GB. It has a stripped down win11 and a Linux mint.
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
Fellow Tumbleweed lover here for all the same reasons!
This distro has been fantastic. A few times there’s been some growing pains (8/10 of those directly being Nvidia’s fault by my estimation), but Snapper rollbacks have been ultra reliable in getting to “known working state” until stuff gets sorted out.
It’s such an unbelievably sane and sturdy rolling release. I also appreciate YAST and how it feels like they put effort into making pro-security choices by default without interfering with the user’s experience too much.
I’m stuck (probably not, though) on an old tumbleweed version because something in my networking setup gets borked when I upgrade on a headless server I have running (I know, tumbleweed isn’t for servers, this is why). I just reverted to the snapshot it made before upgrading and bam, like nothing happened.
I should get that worked out, but it works fine, so…
Hey there! Isn’t MicroOS for servers? It’s still openSUSE, but specifically for servers. I could be wrong though! :)
I don’t think it’s specifically for servers, it’s just their immutable distro. I tried it out a smidge on my cheap laptop, it was interesting. My laptop only has 32gb, so anything immutable really wasn’t a good fit for it. I wasn’t really a big fan of everything I add to it being flatpaks, either.
I think I have enough experience with Linux at this point that an immutable distro is more of an inconvenience to me. I don’t think it would have saved me from my predicament any more than using a non-rolling distro, since this is an OS update, not anything to do with anything I did. Really my biggest setback is that this server is working just fine, so my laziness is letting me not spend a few hours to redo it right and I’m pretty sure I could just run yast and reconfigure the networking and be fine. It really was just going to be a practice/dev server so I could see if I could set things up in an environment that didn’t have many handholding tutorials, the leap server it was dev for ended up moving to Debian because it started running things that I actually wanted to be sure were stable. In my infinite wisdom, this one took over the leap server’s job without changing the OS.
Really, I could have just swapped drives since I was rebuilding in Debian anyway, but Homie don’t play like dat.
Yes! I’ve used quite a few of the most recommended for newbies distros, and none compare (in my experience, at least) to Tumbleweed, and that’s not even a “noob friendly” distro apparently!
Like you, I had issues when installing my new graphics card. Took a few days of rolling back before I found out the correct way to install their new “open-driver” variant. Been smooth sailing since, but I also haven’t zypper dup since then out of fear of it all going away again. :P
Lads and lassies and everything between, it is best to make a full snapshot of your working distro BEFORE doing anything crazy like installing new drivers. TRUST ME!
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn’t ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
You’re certainly doing Linux! I’ve only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)
I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn’t too bad.
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.
In 2010 it was the smartphone? Not the dozen older computers, misc laptops, or even maybe a tablet lying around?
The sharp zaurus sl5500 with full color and useful in daylight screen was all the way back in 2004 for example.
Or the Asus Eepc in 2007 and it came with Linux!
I would have thought everyone would have access to a cheap fallback computer by then.
I can’t tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn’t exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.
Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would’ve been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.
I could’ve asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would’ve been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.
And so it’s not that I think it’s weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It’s that I think it’s weird to not understand that not everyone else did.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something… anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn’t you, thats cool.
taking a shot at installing a new OS
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
Yeah I’m assuming they didn’t have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible
Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD
Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD
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.
Lots of Windows machines come with the OS preinstalled but no install media, you will need another computer in that case.
You can make a recovery disk or whatever it’s called.
Sure, if you think to do so before your computer doesn’t work
Meh, safe mode with networking is pretty reliable about getting you back online (as long as you aren’t using WiFi).
Plus, this complaint kinda loses it’s validity when I have 3 computers on my desk, and most people have at least 1 in their pocket at all times.
Yeah, im kinda young and grew up with a smartphone in my pocket so this seems like a non issue to me. I guess some people who aren’t as old still think landlines are the hot new thing?
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.
Id do the same thing! I JB welded a USB stick on my conceal carry so when I screw up my boot loader I can sigh and whip out my gun and put it in my computer.
Unrelated, I’m banned from public libraries statewide.
Hey, I’m impressed
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 reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC… then someone replied “wait wouldn’t just running the ‘install VLC’ command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?”
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.
Phew, so I’m not alone? 😂
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won’t work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn’t run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn’t run on many laptops – I don’t know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn’t work, and it couldn’t sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can’t remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn’t sleep >_>
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
