Linux

The "starting over" part is what made it take so long for linux to "stick" with me.

Once it became "restore from an earlier image", it was a game changer!

Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it's functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.

It's even better if your only internet connection is that computer you broke.

No no no! When you break something in Linux systems you fix it. Starting over and reinstalling everything is what you do when you mess up on Windows.

Pretty much everytime I try to do fancy stuff with the bootloader I get pretty close to nuking systems. Worst was my 1st UEFI system where I was trying to get rEFInd to show multiple OS to boot from... eventually gave up and went back to the warm embrace of GRUB

Never the kernel but just about every time I touch /etc/fstab I fuck something up. I've done that a lot....

Uhm, zero? With ten years of using Linux? What did you do to fuck up the damn kernel? o_O

So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn't get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?

I think I'm past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I've never had to use it.

Maybe 1 or 2 back when things were less stable, but any time I have used Linux in the past 7 years or so, and particularly since I started using Debian as my primary OS, I haven't had any problems outside of trying to get some windows applications to emulate correctly, and one time when I echo'd into sources.list with > instead of >>. Anything else is just stuff I had to learn, like my boot folder filling up with old images that have to be cleaned out occasionally.

It's the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don't be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it's fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don't give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That's just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don't like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

May I introduce you to my lord and saviour NixOS?

I tried to use dd with too much hubris once. I had to restore from backups (which ironically, I had made with dd). I'm usually overly cautious, but I was in a hurry.

I would actually be amazed if I ever bricked a PC fucking around with installing software to it. At the very worst, I might have to move a jumper pin to flash the CMOS and start fresh like I never even touched the thing. If somehow even that fails, it would be a unique experience.

1

Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.

Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.

When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!

I haven't majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao

Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation... And couldn't figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.

Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.