Quazatron

I’m old enough to remember UML (User Mode Linux). I don’t know if it’s still around, but it was a port of the Linux kernel that you would run as a standard user binary.

I just want to add that you that you can also setup multiple user accounts for different uses. One for banking, one for gaming, one for downloading random crap. It will not protect against privilege escalation attacks but will help against random scripts exfiltrating your personal documents.

Another nice layer is containers and containerized applications (flatpaks, bubblewrap, etc). Each app will be somewhat limited in what damage it can do.

Running pi-hole as your DNS or using some other filtered DNS provider (Mulvad or others) will also protect you from some shady sites.

Cups is awesome. I have an ancient HP laserjet 1100 connected to an ancient parallel-to-Ethernet adapter, connected to my ancient router. Cups works flawlessly with this setup, Windows never worked.

My advice is: this isn’t Windows, so if you look at the logs you will probably find clues to what is wrong. With those clues you can find help online, either from blog articles or from Linux forums like this one.

I know reinstallation is the default in the Windows world, but you stand to learn a lot from trying to solve the issues you are facing.

I use Flatpaks for a lot of stuff (Steam, Firefox, and some other stuff that I feel should not have access to my tax returns in the Documents directory). It’s not just for beginners, Flatpaks are useful for other reasons.

Don’t feel bad, I’ve used Linux since 1995 and don’t have enough skills to use Bottles.

I do however game a lot, using mainly Steam and Heroic. You can try to start there.

This is the kind of selfless, talented, focused person that I am thankful for when I look at the FOSS ecosystem and how far it has come.

An it really deeply annoys me when these talented persons, who’ve spent countless hours reverse engineering crap, undocumented, proprietary technologies that the original vendor didn’t care enough for its’ users to document or open source, get blasted online by entitled brats that say “Linux sux, my AAA game don’t work!”.

My thank you to all of them that made all the great tools that I use and love today.

Why do you have to have this xor that? Why can’t I like both? I’m sure both have use cases where they work best.

Drop the hate already.

Do we? Who’s we?

smaller pool of desktop users

There, I fixed it for you.

This is about desktop Linux, so I was wrong to correct you. My bad.

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

Oh no, my desktop is fried!

1. Create a new user.
2. Login as new user.
3. Copy your old files over.
5. Profit.

I always treat the system as discardable and only backup the /home and /etc directories. Saving those, I can afford to wipe the system and re-settle on a new distro if I want to.

Of course if you throw Windows into the mix, all bets are off. Personally, I stay the hell away from that.

Mark it as an achievement on your learning path and move on. We all did something silly like that at some point.

Great that you have backups, get a fresh install and restore it.

Lessons learned: don’t work as root unless you absolutely positively have a good reason to do so.

Manjaro seems to be a word that gets you down voted pretty quickly.

I’ve been using it for years with few issues, but then I’m not using AUR.

I also use EndeavorOS, Xubuntu, Debian in other machines. One thing that annoys me about EndeavorOS is that using a graphical package manager is not recommended but I’ve grown to like using those.

Let me count the ways:

• Edited /etc/sudoers with vi instead of visudo.
• The classic rm -fr /
• The typical chown myuser: / -R
• Removed the bootloader dunno why
• Some shenanigans involving dd and the wrong device

I could go on, but my memory tends to erase the painful memories.

My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.

I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.

I just have to do a system update every year or so.

She’s now 87.

It blows my mind that we had multiple modern ways to setup volumes in Linux (LVM, ZFS, BTRFS) for decades, yet people keep using partitions like it’s 1990.

That’s pretty much it.

So you’re implying we can expect Half-Life 3 for Christmas?