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
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.
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.
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 :
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 Jason in 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
Could it be a dying SSD?
How is /etc/fstab configured? 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
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.
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. :-)
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.
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).
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.
RIP, this is sad day today
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."
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.
Really out of my depth here, but anyway—
What model computer does your mom have? Does it by any chance have solid state drives that are RAID 0?
Have you tried Linux Mint? After really struggling with Fedora, I was able to get Mint up and running after a few minimal problems and haven't looked back since.
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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