boot: "you are in emergency mode"

It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.

Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it's a conf file for Xorg... but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn't, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
- Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me...
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.
As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure...

Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?

Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
- Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I've broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it's not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you're remotely comfortable with the command line it's pretty trivial to get it booting again.
Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
It's been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved..
- Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
  Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
Literally every time I touch fstab. I've also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
- I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.
  It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
  As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it's not too hard to restore but still.

If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<

I've been there. I'm 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit "Enter"
And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
- This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn't working or ssh'ing into my machine when the video output doesn't work
- Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures

All you need is a bootable usb stick

- To be honest, you need that weekend with Linux too but it’s fun instead of dread, and you get to set it up in a whole new way
- And a second weekend to actually make a working bootable Windows USB.
You're underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there...
- Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn't threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
  All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.

Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy

Nahh. Just use a live boot of the distro of your choice.
- Only Arch doesn't make sense though. Livebooting Debian KDE for Gparted is easier than working with fdisk etc. to eg. move a partition.

Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.

I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.

To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.

At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking "Error Code 0x0000000f" and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of "assistant" on the official forum suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that's ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.
I'll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
- To be fair a lot of the time a blue screen is shitty drivers…
- Have you had severe fuckups yearly with Windows, or Linux?
  I've had bi-yearly severe fuckups with Windows and have yearly (probably more) severe fuckups with Arch;
  the fix to the latter is a thumb drive away, the fix to the former is an ancient ritual which the FBI is still investigating me for.
You mean as long as you pay windows tax by buying a new computer regularly and dont ask for privacy, free software, etc. :)
- I've been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like "tore critical system components I don't need out from the install media" level of customized. A good chunk of the "modify windows for privacy" tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren't there on my install.
  No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
  The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
- Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they'd gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that's what gets them
- I just retired a 2012 Windows 7 machine that had never received any patches/updates.
  Never crashed, never had issues.
  I've run Windows boxes even longer than that.
  Since Win2k, stability improved drastically. XP was another major shift.
  Linux is like running NT4 by comparison (and NT4 was damn stable).

openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.

I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.

Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P

Because it doesn't, by a long shot?
I know this is Linuxmemes.
But boy does that sound like a you problem. Most Windows machines, even those of technology impaired people, doesn't break that often. Mine haven't done so in over 15 years.

learning that most people didn't have a "back up computer" was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT

Just use Tumbleweed or Fedora...or any other distro with amazing brtfs support.

That alone has saved me from myself more times than I want to mention.

A phone is often sufficient for googeling, but if you have ssh it's nice with a secondary computer. Recovered from crashes where no input works so many times.

You can ssh with a phone
- Oh yeah, I use juicessh, but there's also termius and termux for free.

Tbf this would be the same on windows (well, if there was a fix other than reinstall...), unless you just already know the fix, which then would be the same on linux, you just don't know it yet.

Besides, since windows only fix would be to reinstall, no second pc needed, just keep the installation drive and treat it like a windows reinstall, bam same same.

Meh, safe mode with networking is pretty reliable about getting you back online (as long as you aren't using WiFi).
Plus, this complaint kinda loses it's validity when I have 3 computers on my desk, and most people have at least 1 in their pocket at all times.

Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?

I always have at least one partially built computer xD

    
grub rescue>

Thanks for the PTSD.
Worst case scenario:
ls
ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot/
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
insmod normal
normal
insmod linux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-6.6.6 root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img-6.6.6
boot

That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.

One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn't have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.

To me it was vital to have my phone in order to tether the Internet to my computer while trying to find a way to make my "Linux compatible" wifi antenna work.

Tether, try something, stop tethering, rinse and repeat for a whole day

asdf

I've seriously considered installing a small rescue system on all my devices.

I have a small partition that has a copy of Linux Mint live USB. I also have another partition that holds my backups. When I inevitably break my system, I launch Mint and use an rsync command I keep in a text file to revert back to the backup I made.
Using Mint's live usb image has multiple benefits. It has Gparted for partition management. It has basic apps like LibreOffice and Mozilla in case I need them. It has proper printer support too. And since it's a live usb image, every time I launch it, the environment will always be the same. No changes are permanent and will disappear after a reset.
My days of using Mint may be over, but it's too reliable to ever truly leave my system.

Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD

Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.

Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.

Amateurs. I can search for fixes while my computer is still broken!

(ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, etc to switch to TTY, then lynx ddg.gg to get to DuckDuckGo)

Or you can use nixos and boot into the last working configuration (assuming your bootloader is working)

Or Guix
And honestly when grub is your bootloader. The only thing that you can’t fix in grub is if you forget the crypto-module and can’t do cryptomount (hd0,msdos1); insmod normal; normal
- Or Arch with snapper and either refind-btrfs or grub-btrfs.
  This is a solved problem; on some distros it's not even an optional install; it's just set up automatically.
  Before refind-btrfs, I used my phone to download and burn rescue ISOs on demand, because it had become so infrequent a need. The last time I broke my system was replacing the root NVMe with a larger one; I dd'ed the old onto the new and missed a UUID change. It must have been a half dozen years since the previous time.
  My systems got a lot more stable when I changed to a rolling release distro.

I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.

Isn't that what the second kernel is for?

Multiple backup computers. In fact I'm a bit peeved my oldest backup computer broke.

Happened to my wife yesterday. Some update broke grub.

Make a habit to use timeshift or similar backup utility if you continue "exercising your skills". Those allow you to roll back to last known good config.

I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.

Ctrl shift 2 + links2 still works for me most of the time..

I got my new computer three years ago, but I still use the old one with Mint 18 on it for some stuff, and the Eee is in the drawer.

My second computer broke ;.;

i have a whiteboard where i wrote steps to fix common issuee with gentoo

I've been using linux since last December and I haven't majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?

You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn't ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It's not 2003 anymore.

what? windows breaks and you need second screen... but grub never fails you. the meme is closed source propaganda.

Grub failed me 2 times since the last 5 years. I moved to systemd boot. This is systemd propaganda.
- or did you fail grub? grub is always your friend. unlike cocky systemd not even requiring the kernel to be on laaarge efi partition. and can you rice systemd? noes...but grub.
  but ofcourse systemd is "easier", like the iphone or using ai slob. so it depends on which direction you want your life to go...

You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.

Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody's installing MacOS anyway.

I reckon it's because you can't resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS

I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don't mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
- you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
  this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC... then someone replied "wait wouldn't just running the 'install VLC' command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?"
  where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won't work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn't run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn't run on many laptops -- I don't know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
- I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn't work, and it couldn't sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can't remember). It did work though!

This is true for any OS. If it's not working you can't use it to look up how to fix it. That's not unique to Linux.

Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
- As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.

To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren't counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol

I'll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren't actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn't know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Also,
- Windows is a mature, established OS, it is perfectly capable of breaking on it's own without the user's input
wiping and reloading
Built into the firmware on macs lol

That's what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can't switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It's rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I'm sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.

Forgive my dumb ass for asking an easily googleable question;
What is tty?
- TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don't boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,...7, depending on which F key you pressed) You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
  The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
- Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It's been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.

Can't relate, I do not use Arch.

Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.