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Somehow the EFI partition doesn't mount and it's impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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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!
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
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.
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 :
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?
Here https://github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/blob/main/download-isos.sh#L3