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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.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something… anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn’t you, thats cool.
taking a shot at installing a new OS
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
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?
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.
Sure, if you think to do so before your computer doesn’t work
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.
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.
Hey, I’m impressed
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.
Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.
I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.
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.
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.
a barely functioning windows environment…that’s only useful for very specific things.
Sounds like a full Windows install to me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.
You can boot windows of an usb stick. You can create that with rufus. I tried it out of curiosity and it actually works.
That’s really true for any OS. There’s always a helpful friend’s computer or your phone.
Do you guys not have phones?
Assuming you’re making a reference to a particularly bad E3 moment … I hear that
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.
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.
This has been my experience, yes.
This was true for Windows as well.
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?
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.
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.
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.
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.
learning that most people didn’t have a “back up computer” was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT
