Well, the command was designed to fix the most common Windows problems like corrupted files and weird settings. So of course help lines are going to ask to run it. It was made to automatically fix problems.
to answer your question, Linux systems tend to be more stable than windows when it comes to just leaving it running and different distros have different tools for repairing files. Funny enough I actually fixed a windows installation using a equally user friendly tool that shipped with Ubuntu
I was trying to setup Timeshift for system snapshots on a work computer with Ubuntu. It didn’t work for some reason so I tried to first get rid of it. After uninstalling it, I wanted to remove, what I though, were remains of TS files in /run/timeshift, but the root partition was still mounted, so I rm-rfd the whole root, luckily except for home. And the computer has BIOS password with secure boot, so talking to IT dep about what I’ve done that is…. Or is it? The /boot and the initramfs was still in place, so it was dropping me to emergency shell when trying to boot. Connecting external USB to see if I can mount it, hmm doesn’t show up. Quick search on my private computer what kernel modules are required for USB storage, modprobed couple of xhci_* and bang, was able to mount it. I saved result of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid on the drive and moved to my private PC, where I created VM and installed exact same Ubuntu with exact config (LVM+Luks) and after it was done I copied all of / content to the (now formatted as ext4) external drive using cp -a, then edited fstab and crypttab to put proper UUIDs there, set up hostname and user account accordingly. Then moved back to the borked laptop, copied the newly installed Ubuntu back to the root partition, rebooted and it worked perfectly on first try and continues to work. All of that roller coster in just a single hour.
Working for a VoIP company in the early 2010s I rm -rf’d the /bin/ directory. As root. On a production server. On site.
I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting) then manually coppied over the files from another machine. Chrooted and some stuff was broken but rebuilding from the package manager reinstalled everything that was missing. Got the system back up in around 40 mins after that colossal screw up. Good fun and a great learning experience. Honestly, my manager should not have had me doing anything on a root shell with no training.
I’ve found that the silliest desktop problems are usually the hardest to solve, and the “serious” linux system errors are the easiest.
System doesn’t boot? Look at error message, boot from a rescue disk, mount root filesystem and fix what you did wrong.
Wrong mouse cursor theme in some Plasma applications, ignoring your settings? Some weird font rendering issue? Bang your head against a wall exploring various dotfiles and rc files in your home directory for two weeks, and eventually give up and nuke your profile and reconfigure your whole desktop from scratch.
Yeah for some reason a single game ignores the system sound settings and goes straight to a line out. My system doesn’t see that the game is outputting sound and I can’t change it. (Arch with KDE)
Somewhat related on windows 11, for some reason teams volume will desync from system volume. I’ll put system volume to 0 and still be hearing teams. It’s the same audio device being selected. I don’t understand why it would ever work that way but here we are
Oh my god, you’ve put it into (really nice) words something I’ve felt since quite some time now. I’ve no trouble (in fact even joy) when something major is fucked up. But all this GUI shenanigans, I’ve usually no idea where to even begin. The lack of structure and hierarchy completely flummoxes me. Or maybe I just don’t have enough experience debugging userland stuff
A couple of weeks ago I moved Firefox to one side. Window disappeared, but Firefox was still running “somewhere” on my desktop, but was not actually be rendered to the screen. Killing the process and relaunching just resulted in it be rendered to this weird black hole. Log out of gnome and log back in? Same! Reboot? Same!
Ended up deleting it’s config folder and re-attaching to Firefox sync in order to have it working again. No idea what went wrong, nor will I ever most likely.
There really should be a hotkey for “move window to primary display” or somesuch. The worst is when just the top “cleat” of the window is inaccessible, making it impossible to simply move the window yourself.
Alternately, a CLI tool to just trash a specific app’s window settings, or a system control panel that lets you browse these settings, would be incredible.
In every GUI I’ve used, there are tiling or snapping hotkeys, something like Super + Arrow keys or something, that will usually put the window somewhere sane.
I feel like i had a disappearing window like that a lifetime ago and the fix was to change the resolution. I don’t know if that uncovered the void to the right or forced the window to reassign itself to usable space. But it worked then. Hell, it could have been windows for all I recall.
I once broke my Ubuntu install by trying to convert it KDE Neon, that reinstalled half my packages and left it in an basically unusable state. I then un-broke the install while upgrading multiple Ubuntu releases, that reinstalled the other half as well. It actually worked, and I’m still using that install.
It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:
Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.
To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.
My first Linux machine crashing. This was way before Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, or OpenSUSE. This was installed from 60+ floppy disks on a 386-40 with 8MB of RAM.
This machine ran happily, but it crashed under heavy load. I checked out causing the load by using different applications, but could not nail it to a certain software. So the next thing I checked was the RAM. Memtest86 ran for a day without any problems. But the crashes still came. So I got the infrared camera from the lab to see if some hardware overheats. Nope, this went nowhere, either.
Then I tested the harddisk. Read test of the whole HD went without problems. I copied the data on a backup medium and did a write and read test by dd’ing /dev/zero over the whole disk, and then dd’ing the disk to /dev/null. Nothing did show up.
I reinstalled the Linux, and it crashed again. But this time, I noticed that something was odd with the harddisk. I added a second swap partition, disabled the first, and the machine ran without problems. Strange…
So I wrote a small program that tested the part of the disk occupied by the old swap space: Write data, read data, and log everything with timestamps. And there was the culprit: There was an area on the HD where I could write any data, but when I read blocks from that area, a) It took a very long time for the read, b) the blocks I read were containing all zero, regardless of what I had written, and worst of all c) there was no error indication whatsoever from the controller or drive. Down at the kernel level, the zeroed blocks were happily served by the HD with an “OK”. And the faulty area was right in the middle of the original swap partition.
It was some combination of both, the system would post, past the bootloader, attempt to initialize drivers and other standard starting packages and then immediately panic and drop into an emergency terminal (/TTS), with a failure to mount the root partition, from what I can recall. It tried it a couple times and then there was an error message that said: “Bailing out, you are on you own, good luck”
I can’t remember the details anymore, but for a year or two I had a bad run of absolutely hosing my boot config and leaving myself in a state where the system either couldn’t find it’s kernel or couldn’t find the root partition and would drop me into an initramfs emergency shell. I got pretty good at booting into a live environment, getting all my dm-raid and lvm disks discovered, mounting all the relevant file systems in the right place, chrooting in and rebuilding the pieces that were broken
This will feel extremely simple for some folks, but I was having a hell of a time getting Steam games that had previously worked through Proton running. I scoured the internet for solutions after trying to install proton-ge and testing multiple versions. Eventually someone had the galaxy brain idea to suggest installing WINE. For some reason, that fixed the problem real good.
Maybe this goes a bit deeper than the question intended, but I’ve made and shared two patches that I had to apply locally for years before they were merged into the base packages.
Not a Linux problem per se, but I had a 128GB image disk in a unknown .bin format which belongs to a proprietary application. The application only ran on Windows.
I tried a few things but nothing except Windows based programs seemed able to identify the partitions, while I could run it in Wine, it dealt with unimplementend functions. So after a bit of googling and probing the file, it turns out the format had just a 512 bytes as header which some Windows based software ignored. After including the single block offset, all the tools used in Linux started working flawlessly.
This is so arcane to me. Like, I more or less understand your high-level explanation, but then you gloss over “including the block offset” but how would one do that ??
Inspecting the file with a hex editor would give you lots of useful info in this case. If you know approximately what the data should look like, you can just see where the garbage (header) ends and the data starts. I’ve reverse engineered data files from an oscilloscope like this.
Well, in this scenario the image file had 512 bytes sections, each one is called a block. If you have a KiB (a kibibyte = 1024 bytes) it will occupy 2 blocks and so on…
Since this image file had a header with 512 bytes (i.e. a block) I could, in any of the relevant Linux mounting software (e.g. mount, losetup), choose an offset adding to the starting block of a partition. The command would look like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((header+partition)) img_file /mnt
</span>
single gpu vm passthrough. took a few days for troubleshooting, and i didnt even want to get it to be undetectable by game anticheat, i hear that needs building your own kernel for some advanced detection methods.
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