My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.

One of us. One of us

(it was nvidia related)

lel we got 'im, boys. /s

Migrating a 8 year old server to fresh new hardware. Can't believe you can basically just rsync one computer to another

the truest form of Linux, without all the GNU bloat, well done! :)

TimeShift. Life saver, and great tool for learning without having to worry about breaking shit permanently.

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.

Does anyone sell 'Yes, Do As I Say!' stickers?

You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.

If you don't mess with the partitions during the install and don't format, and make the same username, you should be back to normal after a reinstall. Take a backup offline, of course.

ctrl + z

Nice, you get a sticker!

Ahh, baby steps.

Around fours years ago I was still using Arch and I somehow decided to try LFS on my main machine (bare metal unfortunately). Started compiling coreutils but as I forgot to specify the build directory to gmake, my /usr/bin directory was being emptied to make space for the coreutils compilation process. Bricked my whole installation.

Now I'm smarter than four years ago as I mainly use NixOS.

Reinstall using btrfs as the root files system and enable automatic snapshots. The data on your home partition will be fine, just make sure the installer doesn't format it.

If you are trying a new install go for something with timeshift or Silver Blue, OpenSUSE snapshotting. You can trash the whole setup, then reboot to the previous state. A catastrophic failure becomes a 1 minute fix.

If anything can be salvaged, I'd suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don't come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I'd recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)

Yeah but, you're a towel.

Recently upgraded a laptop that had been on the shelf for 5 years up to latest version. Flawless one-step upgrade! nixos. Things never get in a tangle where installing and uninstalling packages leaves random artifacts behind. If you saved it to version control, you can return to a past system configuration and the only thing different is your home directory data.

And yes, if you have a home partition and root partition, that's exactly what you can do. That's the beauty of that approach. But back it up!

Couple days ago I accidentally removed a package, not fully understanding what would happen. Ended up logging out thinking nothing of it. Couldn't log back in as there were zero sessions available. Also, for some reason a huge on-screen keyboard kept popping up a lot when I'd click on the login panels things.

I am very grateful my distro came with Timeshift by default and that I had a backup from the day before to fix everything. Also glad Rescuezilla allowed me to install Timeshift and restore.

Doesn't matter who you are or what you believe, it's definitely a rite of passage to break your system once. That is something I'll always agree with.

Last week I accidentally overwrote my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don't, that file contains a description of your entire system -- all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.

I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that's not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn't that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.

Congratulations OP!

About a year and a half ago I nuked my root partition with sudo rm -rf /*. Fun times.

Welcome to the club, here's your penguin 🐧

Back the hell up. Seriously. I cannot overstate how peaceful life is when your ass is properly covered.

On the bright side, it's never been a better time to switch to an immutable distro...

Lol Nvidia has quiet the reputation in the Linux world. Keep at it though. We all make mistakes.

I'm not clear what you've done here, but I've never played with the purge command. I take it you removed a lot of basic packages. How did it happen? Wildcards?

congrats you're ready for the next step: a declarative package configuration like (non-)guix or nixos

Try to fix it.

FWIW each new install is faster, especially if you write down the "weird" steps.

Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?

Yes, but you might have to muck around with /etc/fstab. The reason is because when you install to your root partition, the installer will create a new /home in that root partition. (Unless you have an installer that's smart enough that you can tell it otherwise.)

You should be able to mount the partition in any case, but to have the system recognize it as /home it has to be properly set up in fstab.

I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits

I've done the same thing (Nvidia related) on a machine hooked up to an expensive scientific instrument. Didn't get any other work done that day... Ugh.

Yes.

I wouldn't do it without tests and "enough" experience.

I would backup first.

Then I would install an atomic distro because I wouldn't want to care about this ever again