It’s not really broken, couldn’t get the microphone to work with any program
If you reinstall enough things, enough times, it becomes a kink.
Use Timeshift, use Timeshift, use Timeshift.
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?
What
In the off chance that this isn’t a joke, does your distro really not have timeshift binaries?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤷♂️
Whenever we (Brother and I) broke our W95 install, it was a pretty high stakes race against the clock to get it to work as expected again, because if my dad got home from work and found out about the broken machine, there would be consequences (him being frustrated, us not allowed to play C&C red alert or Warcraft II)
