Somehow the EFI partition doesn’t mount and it’s impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞
Is this a Dell machine or something similar? It’s not impossible that the internal battery has run dry, and it reset the UEFI settings. A lot of setups would refuse to work if internal storage mode has switched from AHCI to hardware RAID
This EFI thing is literally squarely a Microsoft induced problem.
You must work in tech support with that attitude to the problem 🤣
The user has a problem. Do you want to be right or do you want a satisfied user? I can tell you which path popular operating systems choose.
And I say this 5 different OSes at home, 3 of which are Linux distros.
I don’t think that the point here was trying to do anything to say that the user did anything wrong. I think it’s simply pointing out how frustrating it is that Microsoft’s Insistence on various things, as part of their EEE policy, created this situation to begin with, and that it wouldn’t have even broken if not for that.
I’m pretty sure that the person you replied to was really just lamenting that that this is what broke it. And that fundamentally, Microsoft is getting exactly what they wanted as a result. And it’s just frustrating.
A satisfied user and RCA are equally important.
I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.
Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he’d bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that’s what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.
Since then, he’s called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.
Dad’s in his 80’s and was a cop with an associate’s degree; he’s never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that’s OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I’m stupidly loyal to Arch.
I’m sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that’s super frustrating.
Could it be a dying SSD?
I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.
Linux has problems, but I’m so glad I don’t have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he’d consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.
He didn’t even know about onedrive, just phoned me like “The Internet isn’t working, what’s wrong?” and of course onedrive is the last thing I’d have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.
Much nicer now his OS doesn’t do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.
set his account up without any superuser access
Oh, revenge for when he had parental restrictions on the router and you couldn’t get to teh pron, huh?
I like it.
Hehe, you might think that!
In actuality though, I’ve always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.
So yeah, I’ve always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.
I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.
The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.
One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.
Yeah. When the cloud has more control over your own files than you do, that’s not a feature, it’s a problem.
This is so common they added a notification when you delete a lot of files. It basically prompts you, you’re deleting a lot of stuff are you sure? OK, it’ll be available in the recycle bin for 30 days if you change your mind.
See that’s the kicker, windows has so many “are you sure” pop ups about stuff that most people just click through them without reading the fine print. People get desensitized to it and just ignore them, or maybe even they just assume microsoft is trying to sell them on a feature they don’t care about.
And in this case it didn’t save the files to the trash can, I imagine because it was synching local files with what was in one drive. Not the user deleting local files.
Google Photos pulled the same shit after it uploaded all of the my photos on my phone without permission. Eventually I tried to delete a bunch of pictures off the app, with the trashcan button… and soon realized that they were being erased from my actual phone storage as well. No warning, or indication that it would do so. Like wtf
This pisses me off a lot
They designed their photos app to always ask “y u no backup” and scare you “you gonna lose all your photos if u no backup” and ask to enable backup with the “no thanks” button under the fold
Enable backup = Gmail blocked within one hour because of all the photos we all have in our phones nowadays
So you have to pay or delete that pictures from their servers
Pay Google: unacceptable
Delete the pics from web: they get deleted from phone automatically and there isn’t an option to only delete from web but keep in phone
Disable the photos app on the phone: the (Google) camera app doesn’t show shot preview anymore because it says photos app is missing
They clearly had multiple meetings to make it harder as possible
Great example of why a safety net is required.
Yes hopefully the “base” setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings… but what happens when it break?
Windows (despite all the criticism, and I’m one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).
So… you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it… then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.
While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.
IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she’ll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!
I find it’s super rare any form of recovery actually works. best thing to do is pull the files you need off with a nvme/sata adapter then reinstall and replace those files. 90% when windows actually breaks there’s not much to be done (I try all forms of recovery every time though).
plus, 9/10 times the reinstall process is actually way faster than fighting with windows or searching for the problem online and getting hundreds of people asking you to run sfc \scannow.
super rare any form of recovery actually works. […] 90% when windows actually breaks
To clarify I used Windows as an example of an OS which manages its own recovery. I’m absolutely not suggesting to use Windows.
I’m personally using Debian so here are some examples of official resources :
- https://wiki.debian.org/SystemRescue
- https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch08s06.en.html
- https://wiki.debian.org/RescueLive which seems to rely https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD which seems impractical for most, instead one could consider https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apas02.en.html#howto-getting-images-usb
Honestly none of these look like practical options for somebody who is not working in IT.
Here are examples of community provided resources :
The very last one, namely Ventoy Linux Recovery Helper, looks quite interesting. Unfortunately there is literally 0 issue https://github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issues which makes me think very few people might be actually using it. In fact while creating the first issue https://github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issues/1 I noticed
# Created by Claude for Jasonin the header leading me to believe this was AI generated. Regardless of how it was done (sigh) it seems it was not thoroughly tested so I clearly would look for another alternative.How do I see the hidden header?
There also are distros with some kind of similar safety net. Immutable distros usually let you Boot previous versions if an update breaks something. This usually means that they need a lot of storage tho. https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/
I used to recommend Mint with Timeshift. Timeshift has saved my ass (or has made fixing stuff way easier) a couple of times. Now my go to is Aurora.
I believe that immutable distros are a game changer (god I hate this expression) for nebws.
I have had to do this with fedora in the past and i was able to fix my boot issues and then go back to the newest version
How is
/etc/fstabconfigured? Partitions should be assigned to mount points by UUID and not by their names (such as/dev/sda1). Names can easily change across boots.Something to look into. Understand the frustrations here, but it looks like something that can be fixed if you are able to get to the machine and troubleshoot.
How the heck is mom supposed to know what an fstab is?
RTFM, Mom!
If the EFI partition truly was at fault, you wouldn’t get into Linux. And if the issue is mounting the efi partition after booting, that shouldn’t be a critical error. So it sounds like something else is at fault IMO
It’s good your mom tried. It’s sad she gave up so soon. I’ve helped 4 people switch in the past months. I’ve gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. :-)
At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook
Was she tricked? I would think the jig would be up the second she clicked on something.
My mom is old. Her whole workflow is just open the browser and go to gmail, and forward me a bunch of spams…
Whether its on iOS or debian, you can’t tell the difference unless you’re looking hard
Would be tricked if you just say “apple forced an update.”
What distro did this happen on?
How long ago did you install it?
Pop os, a few months ago
Pop os wasn’t the best distribution to start her on. It’s new. Unstable and updates often. Linux mint, Debian, fedora.
It’s new. Unstable and updates often.
Are you thinking of some other distribution?
Pop! hasn’t released a new version since 2022 and rarely updates aside from security patches.
Your using pop os cosmic? Its still I alpha stage.
Try silverblue or kinoite something immutable that will not break
Bluefin/Aurora is the most sane option in that space, stock Silverblue offerings are lacking a few essentials.
For me personally no,they both over bloated with many useless tools,why installing custom terminals dozens no need containers waydroid and else .From my case what elderly was need is browser and office and some social apps that it nothing more
Or btrfs with snapper snapshots you can roll back to. Either way I suspect hard drive corruption. That’s usually what it is for me (although I do lose power with abnormal frequency)
wild
I’ve been off and on popos for like a 5 years and other than early issues with sound and Bluetooth, don’t ever even think about
Are updates being done by the OS automatically or are you going into the terminal and running an apt-get upgrade periodically?
I’ve had issues when I do a terminal update because I believe that Pop expects you to do an apt-get dist-upgrade
Loool, all the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot are 1) probably correct and 2) completely missing the point. I have a Windows desktop, a Mac, and a Linux desktop at home and this kind of shit only happens on Linux these days.
You’re right, this never happens on windows. It’s so robust no one ever complains
/s
People complain about all the invasive controlling bullshit Windows does. I haven’t seen any kind of failure to boot issue with windows in a long time and I work in IT. Last thing I really remember being common in our organization was bitlocker getting triggered and people having to call in to get the key to unlock it, and that was back in the windows 7 days.
How am I the only one who does have annoying issues like this on Windows (except that Windows only gives a useless error code at most) while Linux has failed to boot a total of once (without me explicitly changing nvidia drivers).
You aren’t. My bf has constant problems with Windows that he barely knows how to diagnose (not that he isn’t knowledgeable about computers, the problems are just…opaque.) He doesn’t seem to perceive them as being related to Windows, though. I think that might be what’s going on with a lot of people.
System breaking errors that doesn’t allow you to even login?
Windows have lots of issues, but it’s been a while since I found those system breaking issues to be somehow common.
For all their shit, credit myst be given when credit is due. And windows it’s become a really robust systems against layer 8 issues. Even powering off middle update is kind of easy to recover (I have to solve this issue for a user recently).
I’ve only had it quite that bad once when I just rebooted and it decided to pull an update. After that the bios was unable to find any of the bootloaders on my system. (Fixed with a lot fiddling from a liveusb. Is a dual boot system but I haven’t touched Windows on it since 2023)
These other ones just made it unusable. Another time on a laptop it pulled updates in the background and would crash itself just after login. (Needed to be reinstalled and I lost some data which wasn’t backed up yet. setup by manufacturer)
Then on a different desktop system it just would bsod every few minutes, barely leaving time to go through logs. (I finally fixed it by changing a BIOS setting and reinstalling Windows, setup by manufacturer installed Linux on a separate drive and it was fine until the drive malfunctioned)
This was not a crash, just a thirty minute delay. A couple of days ago that device did an update without me even logging in. I accidentally started windows, then immediately selected reboot in the power menu before entering a password. It then ‘prepared’ something and told me not to reboot, bypassed grub, rebooted again, bypassed grub (after I missed the bios), rebooted again back into grub.
Literally happened updating just yesterday so I went to an older boot entry. The Matrix channel blamed my hardware, but the older revision boots just fine
Right but you see it never happened to that person so it means it’s like that for everybody else. Clearly you are wrong. /s
My MacBook is getting very long in the tooth and the updates via OCLP are working in creating a system that is painfully slow to use. I’ve been tinkering with various Linux distros for 20 years and the thought of having one as my only daily driver does not sound appealing. I really don’t want to drop the money on a new laptop but I need something to work without constantly troubleshooting.
I have Linux running on 6 different MacBooks (2009 - 2021). They were all EndeavourOS at first though some are Chimera Linux now.
They run great. Even the 2009 really.
Thank you. I’ve not tried EndeavorOS, so I’ll check it out! Most of what I’ve been running have been flavors of Ubuntu with a brief Gentoo and OpenSUSE period.
RIP, this is sad day today
That happens when I select the wrong kernel in the systemd boot menu, before that screen. Doing nothing after an upgrade also selects the wrong version by default, it’s kinda annoying. I have to select the most up to date version and press Ctrl-D to make it the default on the next boot.
If that’s also what happens here, maybe a solution could be to keep only one kernel version and its fallback. But idk if you’re using systemd-boot or grub
I also have a “current” kernel and an LTS one. If current ever has an issue, I just reboot into LTS.
It has saved me on Arch at least once.
You might try using rEFInd instead.
Out of curiosity what did you install ? And what did you install it on ?
