1mo ago

boot: "you are in emergency mode"

https://mendeddrum.org/@DJDarren/114578538319016264

234 comments

It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
- Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
  I mean, I get it, it's a conf file for Xorg... but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn't, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
  You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
  
  Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
  
  Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn't true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can't handle and you're out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
  You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
- My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me...
  I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
  But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.
  As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
  Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure...
- Links2 saved my ass a couple times switching to Linux this last year, still a staple when you prefer reading on a real screen.
- Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
  So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.

If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<
- I've been there. I'm 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
  "Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit "Enter"
  And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
  Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
  Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
  
  This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
  
  REISUB
- Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
- If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I'd have a nickel.
- your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn't working or ssh'ing into my machine when the video output doesn't work
  
  Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures

Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
- Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
  
  Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I've broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it's not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you're remotely comfortable with the command line it's pretty trivial to get it booting again.
  
  Had my server set up with encrypted drives and getting the root key from a flash drive. Cloned a drive and replaced the old one, somehow it was crypttab that just stopped working with me. Took like 4 hours solid to get it actually back up.
  
  Lol I just had an fstab issue today where my computer wouldn't boot
- Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
- Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
  It's been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved..
  
  Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
  Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
- Literally every time I touch fstab. I've also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
- Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
  
  I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.
  It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
  As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.
- Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
- Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
- I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it's not too hard to restore but still.
  
  My NAS is one place where I wouldn't risk anything that isn't rock solid. Even if you don't lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
- Forgetting to put the correct keys for secure boot.
- I was dual booting, distro hopping to figure out what I liked & didn't like. After a few installs, I got cocky and thought I had the hang of things, and instead somehow deleted the bootloader, or something like that. Couldn't boot up at all to any OS.

Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.
Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.
- I learned about the "nofail" option the hard way when setting up a headless server and typing the address of my NAS wrong.
- This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.
  I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I'd say don't laugh but I still do.
- That's what makes Linux so much fun.

All you need is a bootable usb stick
- You're underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there...
  
  Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn't threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
  All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
  
  Bricked a laptop by trying to flash Coreboot onto it and forgetting to put my original BIOS in the build..
  I had a spare parts laptop and reused the motherboard but still, big oopsies on my part.

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.
  
  Yeah I'm assuming they didn't have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible
  
  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.

Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
- How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
  
  I have multiple lying around, because I'm also very forgetful. And also not only for emergencies, but mainly for maintenance, eg. editing/moving partitions.
  
  It's definitely something you should have lying around for exactly this kind of contingency. That goes for Windows too, btw. Windows installations also get borked and having a Linux live system available can be a life saver.
  
  I have a half dozen of them setup. Any external drive that I use for copying files first gets built with Ventoy and some images.
- Nahh. Just use a live boot of the distro of your choice.
  
  Only Arch doesn't make sense though. Livebooting Debian KDE for Gparted is easier than working with fdisk etc. to eg. move a partition.
- My only issue with this is, I think I have had very low quality USB sticks that get corrupted putting Ventoy on them tbh.
  
  Same. Though I moved to a 30€ 256GB USB-A + USB-C stick, which is more than enough for my ISOs and very quick to write on. And I hope it withstands a lot of write cycles too.
- Can't praise ventoy enough. Brilliant little piece of kit.

To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren't counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol
- I'll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren't actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn't know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
  Also,
  
  Windows is a mature, established OS, it is perfectly capable of breaking on it's own without the user's input
- wiping and reloading
  Built into the firmware on macs lol

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.
- Hey, I'm impressed
- 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.

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.

Commonly referred to as a "smartphone"
- Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
  However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn't have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
  
  Did your bootloader ever fail you? Now how do you debug that?

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
  
  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 😂
- 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!
  
  Lenovo is pretty reliable for that

Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.
- That's not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.
- Does Hiren's BootCD PE count?
  
  No. You have a barely functioning windows environment when using hirens that’s only useful for very specific things. Linux can boot off a flash drive and do literally anything a full install can do.
- You can boot windows of an usb stick. You can create that with rufus. I tried it out of curiosity and it actually works.

I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.

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.

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...
  
  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!

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.
  
  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.

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.
- 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?
  
  Unless you fucked the bootloader
- 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.

A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough
- Or an OS that can rollback easily (ie: Silverblue and friends, NixOS…) Unless you've mangled your bootloader. Then the USB drive comes in handy 😄
- My setup got messed up once after a kernel update that went bad and booting from the live USB and running the recovery install fixed everything for me
  Only problem was that I had lost the USB, but luckily I still had my Win10 partition I can't boot into and make a new one.
  So it seems the lesson here is you don't need another computer as long as you keep another partition with a backup OS on a different drive?

To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.
- At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking "Error Code 0x0000000f" and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of "assistant" on the official forum suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that's ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.
  I'll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
  
  To be fair a lot of the time a blue screen is shitty drivers…
  
  I had a BSoD on Windows that googling said "could be hardware or software related". Thanks, I guess. Nothing in the logs even suggested anything happened except the several hours gap between other useless logs.
- You mean as long as you pay windows tax by buying a new computer regularly and dont ask for privacy, free software, etc. :)
  
  I've been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like "tore critical system components I don't need out from the install media" level of customized. A good chunk of the "modify windows for privacy" tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren't there on my install.
  No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
  The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
  
  Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they'd gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that's what gets them
  
  I just retired a 2012 Windows 7 machine that had never received any patches/updates.
  Never crashed, never had issues.
  I've run Windows boxes even longer than that.
  Since Win2k, stability improved drastically. XP was another major shift.
  Linux is like running NT4 by comparison (and NT4 was damn stable).

learning that most people didn't have a "back up computer" was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT

asdf

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.

This is true for any OS. If it's not working you can't use it to look up how to fix it. That's not unique to Linux.
- Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
  
  As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.

Do you guys not have phones?
- Assuming you're making a reference to a particularly bad E3 moment ... I hear that
- I mean I don't, but it's also been like a decade since I last borked my Linux install. Because I read instructions, and outputs, and don't blindly copy-paste commands, etc. etc.
- There used to be(there might still be) an Android app that turned your phone into a virtual flash-drive thst could boot Linux isos.
  Had some utility if you didn't have anything to make one with.

As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.

A phone is often sufficient for googeling, but if you have ssh it's nice with a secondary computer. Recovered from crashes where no input works so many times.
- You can ssh with a phone
  
  Oh yeah, I use juicessh, but there's also termius and termux for free.

Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD

I remember these tough times. Doing all kinds of shit as a kid and the resolution was just to nuke it all and start anew.
- That's how I learned.

The existing computer can serve as the "second" if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven't borked the hardware).
Yes, it's a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it's all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.
In related news: When did you last make a backup?

This was true for Windows as well.

I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.

Multiple backup computers. In fact I'm a bit peeved my oldest backup computer broke.

undefined

grub rescue>
- Thanks for the PTSD.
- Worst case scenario:
  ls
  ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot/
  set root=(hd0,msdos1)
  insmod normal
  normal
  insmod linux
  linux /boot/vmlinuz-6.6.6 root=/dev/sda1
  initrd /boot/initrd.img-6.6.6
  boot

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.

To me it was vital to have my phone in order to tether the Internet to my computer while trying to find a way to make my "Linux compatible" wifi antenna work.
Tether, try something, stop tethering, rinse and repeat for a whole day

what? windows breaks and you need second screen... but grub never fails you. the meme is closed source propaganda.
- Grub failed me 2 times since the last 5 years. I moved to systemd boot. This is systemd propaganda.
  
  or did you fail grub? grub is always your friend. unlike cocky systemd not even requiring the kernel to be on laaarge efi partition. and can you rice systemd? noes...but grub.
  but ofcourse systemd is "easier", like the iphone or using ai slob. so it depends on which direction you want your life to go...

One does not simply Linux without having a stable backup computer. 👌

That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.
One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn't have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.

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.

Can't relate, I do not use Arch.
- Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.

Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD

I've seriously considered installing a small rescue system on all my devices.
- I have a small partition that has a copy of Linux Mint live USB. I also have another partition that holds my backups. When I inevitably break my system, I launch Mint and use an rsync command I keep in a text file to revert back to the backup I made.
  Using Mint's live usb image has multiple benefits. It has Gparted for partition management. It has basic apps like LibreOffice and Mozilla in case I need them. It has proper printer support too. And since it's a live usb image, every time I launch it, the environment will always be the same. No changes are permanent and will disappear after a reset.
  My days of using Mint may be over, but it's too reliable to ever truly leave my system.

That's really true for any OS. There's always a helpful friend's computer or your phone.

Happened to my wife yesterday. Some update broke grub.

I got my new computer three years ago, but I still use the old one with Mint 18 on it for some stuff, and the Eee is in the drawer.

Until you need a third running an entirely different distribution or OS
I had two laptops both set up very similarly, both Thinkpads on LMDE and running Tailscale.
Something broke my network setup on both of these laptops within the same day and it turned out to be Tailscale DNS conflicting with some other Linux network service, but I only learned that after using my phone to look online

Make a habit to use timeshift or similar backup utility if you continue "exercising your skills". Those allow you to roll back to last known good config.

This has been my experience, yes.

Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.
It is definitely the case that I've had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I've also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn't an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).
It's funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren't so crippled. Similarly, you weren't so crippled if you couldn't use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.
These days, it's pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube -- obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat -- same problem.

I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.

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