Now, if I'm understanding this correctly, the Ubuntu recovery mode tells me it's going to mount / and then run fsck, and then when I press enter it tells me it can't run fsck because / is mounted
Sorry you don't get alt text, I wrote it once and then it got deleted somehow. It turns out Linux device names are pretty hard to type on a phone
In my opinion, this UI in gparted would be improved if it displayed a progress bar, or just… anything to indicate it's actually doing work and not just frozen
Wwwwait… hold on, is it doing anything? If I right click "check and repair file systems" it asks if I want to "apply". If I say yes it seems to warn me it is about to edit my partition table (?) But maybe it just always does that (??)
Okay. I have now successfully run fsck. It didn't find anything and it didn't help.
I guess I just no longer have a Linux partition. That lasted… what, two months?
Possibly this is actually fixable (I can get into a root shell prompt), but since Ubuntu doesn't print anything like an error, it just sits there showing a blinking underscore with no interactivity, I have no way of knowing what the problem is.
@mcc well, certainly not without knowing the correct computer incantations to reveal the problem, anyway. i am honestly not sure how anyone was able to reasonably use Linux before being able to search the web for incantations. i guess the answer is that most people just didn’t?
@GFD what I would do was I would write down all the problems I was seeing, reboot back into Mac OS, connect to IRC and ask what the error messages meant.
@GFD I don't know how to search the web for "blinking underscore", though. Or earher I did search for this and it just gives me a link of every thing that can potentially go wrong with Linux
@mcc last time i installed a Linux, i didn’t even get that, just a black screen. which only sometimes rebooted if i pressed ctrl+alt+del. turned out even though this distro supported Secure Boot, having it enabled disabled all video output (?!). i figured this out by randomly clicking around in the UEFI BIOS until i got a GUI. nothing i got from searches mentioned this as a fix. so using Linux IMO still requires either “wild persistence” or “know someone who knows Linux”, but probably both
The funny thing here is I was only booting into Linux in the first place because I got a request for more information in a bug report I'd filed on Linux Chrome. And now suddenly I'm debugging a failed boot.
"What kinds of things do you do on your Linux system?"
@mcc Feels like you picked the wrong distribution, or hardware, or got too creative with how you configured things. As a fan of Debian I've avoided what you describe.
@mcc I find that Linux is often the same class of thing as, like, 3D printers. You get it to solve a problem/do a thing, but then it brings enough problems of it's own that you realize that it has to become a full time hobby to manage, and you rarely have time to do anything with it but fix/upgrade/research it
@foone@mcc I am incredibly fortunate that I had this epiphany in 1999, thus discovering that I actually had a career path which didn't involve painting space marines for minimum wage
@mcc
yeah that's the thing. as much as people like to joke about "the year of linux on the desktop!" it is far better suited as a server OS that lives headless in some basement or datacenter, only ever used by networked clients and SSH
(Observation: Hotplugging took a while for *nix to support. I remember it being broken as late as 2011 for VGA on my laptop. And it very well may still not work on NetBSD.)
@mcc@foone i think because you don’t use it mainly, and probably have windows on that machine, it’s probably a windows update that fumbled the linux partition, i think i would use a live cd (or the recovery, since you seem to be able to boot that) to reinstall grub.
You can certainly add parameters to the kernel at startup to get more info about what happens, but i didn’t need to do that in close to a decade (despite main-driving Ubuntu), so I’m a bit rusty.
@foone@mcc then, in the time you have available, you figure out enough to do some basic things with it and it is okay, but never really satisfying and also it only solves half of the problems you wanted to solve with it. (have recently adopted a 3D printer and can 100% confirm)
@whitequark@mcc this is why I run all three OSes on a KVM, that way I have no time to possibly do any work, I just alternative between getting mad at different computers
@whitequark Windows is newer to me than Linux is but since using it circa Windows 10 I find that when something goes wrong it is usually possible to get it to display an error message
Okay. Okay! Problem resolved. It turns out what I needed to do was run "repair broken packages" in the Ubuntu recovery mode and then reboot twice. I assumed it hadn't worked because rebooting once didn't help but the second reboot it worked. Or maybe it fixed itself for literally no reason at all.
@mcc My Ubuntu system had a silly UI problem that at first I could only resolve by booting into safe mode, repairing broken packages, then restarting. Then I discovered that restarting gnome solved it without rebooting. Then the problem just went away. Conclusion: Ubuntu is sentient but kind of dumb.
Immediately upon getting into Linux I discovered a new Chrome bug. Chrome for Linux is very, very buggy. They do not seem to be taking Linux platform support seriously the way Firefox does. This is maybe a little unusual when you realize that technically, Chrome is a Linux-based operating system
Windows has had GPU acceleration for a loooong time while we only got it in FF 115 which came... wait, lemme check... last month. Yeah, so Linux-friendly. Linux was always a third-class citizen for them. I tend to believe that Mozilla cares about Linux even less than Chrome does. I would love if they moved over some of that workforce from the Windows side to Linux, but that won't happen because we're the 3%, not the 75-80%. As long as nothing changes in the Mozilla leadership (and it really needs a change, fuck the current CEO and their weird ass priorities and lack of push-back on the web sphere), Firefox will continue to decline in popularity and that's just the truth, I'm saying it as a 15+ year old Firefox (and Thunderbird, at least until I got ProtonMail) user (I've witnessed all of the changes and shenanigans FF pulled on me...).
@dango_ Since about 2004, "Linux based company" has meant "you run Linux in bulk VMs and sometimes on servers, and every single one of your engineers is using a Macbook". Of course it is possible Google itself substantially contributed to this state of affairs.
Alright check out this absolute banger of a bug I found in Chrome Linux. Manually resetting your account password causes Chrome to wedge itself in a state where it refuses to boot, forever, with no error message of any kind, even if you uninstall or reinstall it, until you manually erase a settings directory you probably didn't clearly realize was there. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1472829
I have filed a lot of bugs on Google Chrome for Linux at this point! In my opinion the Chrome team should reward me for my labor in writing these detailed, high-quality bugs by fixing the bugs
if you can mount and chroot somehow, you might try doing whatever it is that ubuntu does when it makes an initrd. I have had my arch system fail to find a disk UUID and just stop. When I eventually tried this approach it worked again.
I am not saying this is your problem. Just a datapoint with an experiment - if ubuntu does the mkinitcpio thing.
@mcc i'm like 90% sure if it's doing some work on the disk it'll pop open a window where you can expand sections for each thing it does, including what commandline programs and flags it's invoking. in this screenshot you clicked the apply button at the top and it's just not reacting at all?
@mcc I'm used to it showing an extra dialog window that shows the currently pending operations (with real time progress updates for some), but maybe that does not apply to file system checks ... or maybe you need to apply the operation? 🤔 (I'm legit not sure.)
@mcc Usually when I get that it's a conflict between current kernel [because I'd just updated Fedora, specifically] and whatever old nvidia drivers I had. [Reinstalling new or even the same version so it can recompile against current kernel normally fixes it unless Wayland is doing "fun Wayland things".] Apparently installing nvidia-proprietary through a package called akmod (I think?) automagics that away. I've just yet to set it up.
@mcc My laptop started doing this after updating recently, although it gets to the GUI after a couple seconds. Absolute terror the first time it happened though. I'm convinced at this point that I'd have issues no matter what OS I picked.
@mcc “it should just work, you should switch distros, it should just work, you should switch distros” they chant over and over, eyes unfocused, clutching hands covering ears or tearing out hair as fans scream and the capacitors smoke and crackle
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