I bricked my Manjaro install by interrupting a kernel update like a fucking doofus.

After two hours of painstaking troubleshooting using a live image I finally resolved the issue. And man is that a good feeling. Solving complex problems (at least to me) on Linux is just such an amazing feeling ♥️

Here's how you would have solved it with Mint:
- Boot from the installation USB stick
- Fire up Timeshift
- Restore the last system snapshot
- Reboot from SSD
- Pull in up to one week of updates
- Be done within about five minutes.

@Fast-Nop

Gentoo Live CD,
Chroot,
Uninstall last kernel or reinstall,
Reinitialize grub configuration.

No need for snapshots.

Dunno how many times I did this... But I can do it from muscle memory.

@IntrusionCM The point of Timeshift is to provide a solution for a reliable system that will rarely if ever fuck up, let alone so often that it becomes muscle memory.

@Fast-Nop :)

Muscle memory thx to too small EFI partitions with VFAT and auto updates...

God I hate it.

Takes a long time to rip it out of a system and to ensure that stuff like e.g. monitoring doesn't do itm

@Fast-Nop Reasonable. What absolut personal data? Or just separate home partition?

@IntrusionCM Mint's Update Manager offers automatic "remove old kernels" so that you won't run into a full boot partition in the first place. That's what I expect from an OS these days, to take basic care of itself without handholding.

@ScriptCoded Timeshift excludes /home by default because it's not meant as backup. Wiping out your personal data from last week just to restore a system snapshot would be a total misdesign.

https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/man/...

"-U, --upgrade=OPTS [Default] Perform an upgrade. If an optional OPTS argument is provided, apt-get will be run with these command line options instead of the default (-o 'Debug::NoLocking=true' -s -qq). Note that you may be required to have root privileges if you do not use the default options."

It doesn't check for updates, it checks and installs them.

Though fail safes exist in many OSes, it entirely depends on the way a package is installed and what options were given.

I was really scratching my head for a long time till I found out that it was a nagios plugin fucking up for a long time.

A desktop OS should be safe unless you run e.g. dpkg manually... so yes. You're right. It _should_ be this way. Though I still fail to see the good in EFI as a lot of it is the same nightmare as before just way more complicated.

Yes, it does feel good when you solved a problem you created :)

@theKarlisK The Arch wiki was wrong with that. It's just that Timeshift doesn't receive tons of updates because it doesn't need to.

Also, the maintainer understandably doesn't provide end user support because he has better things to do. The issue tracker gets flooded with shitty user requests that should have gone in their distros' support forums instead.

Mint maintains its own fork for better integration in Mint, and if Timeshift were to be abandoned, the Mint team could easily maintain it themselves. Installation is no issue because Timeshift is one of the default tools.

@theKarlisK I don't really understand what this is about. I just checked the Github repo under https://github.com/teejee2008/... , and the current version is 21.09.1 from 09/2021. That's exactly what I have on my Mint 20.3 machines.

Ever since 02/2017, there have been regular new versions of Timeshift (actually more like two per year, not one), and 2017 was when it was introduced in Mint 18.3 which dates from 11/2017.

@IntrusionCM with Gentoo I used to
- Live cd
- Chroot
- Recompile kernel

Bootloader etc just stayed the same only kernel image and drivers changed. This was when Reiser was still recommended fs.

In arch it's similar (reinstall kernel package) although I also make snapshots in this brave new world.