Somehow the EFI partition doesn’t mount and it’s impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞
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.
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
This EFI thing is literally squarely a Microsoft induced problem.
You must work in tech support with that attitude to the problem 🤣
The user has a problem. Do you want to be right or do you want a satisfied user? I can tell you which path popular operating systems choose.
And I say this 5 different OSes at home, 3 of which are Linux distros.
I don’t think that the point here was trying to do anything to say that the user did anything wrong. I think it’s simply pointing out how frustrating it is that Microsoft’s Insistence on various things, as part of their EEE policy, created this situation to begin with, and that it wouldn’t have even broken if not for that.
I’m pretty sure that the person you replied to was really just lamenting that that this is what broke it. And that fundamentally, Microsoft is getting exactly what they wanted as a result. And it’s just frustrating.
A satisfied user and RCA are equally important.
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.
Google Photos pulled the same shit after it uploaded all of the my photos on my phone without permission. Eventually I tried to delete a bunch of pictures off the app, with the trashcan button… and soon realized that they were being erased from my actual phone storage as well. No warning, or indication that it would do so. Like wtf
This pisses me off a lot
They designed their photos app to always ask “y u no backup” and scare you “you gonna lose all your photos if u no backup” and ask to enable backup with the “no thanks” button under the fold
Enable backup = Gmail blocked within one hour because of all the photos we all have in our phones nowadays
So you have to pay or delete that pictures from their servers
Pay Google: unacceptable
Delete the pics from web: they get deleted from phone automatically and there isn’t an option to only delete from web but keep in phone
Disable the photos app on the phone: the (Google) camera app doesn’t show shot preview anymore because it says photos app is missing
They clearly had multiple meetings to make it harder as possible
How is
/etc/fstabconfigured? 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!
Could it be a dying SSD?
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
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 :
- https://wiki.debian.org/SystemRescue
- https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch08s06.en.html
- https://wiki.debian.org/RescueLive which seems to rely https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD which seems impractical for most, instead one could consider https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apas02.en.html#howto-getting-images-usb
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?
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/
What distro did this happen on?
How long ago did you install it?
Pop os, a few months ago
Try silverblue or kinoite something immutable that will not break
Bluefin/Aurora is the most sane option in that space, stock Silverblue offerings are lacking a few essentials.
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.
Your using pop os cosmic? Its still I alpha stage.
Are updates being done by the OS automatically or are you going into the terminal and running an apt-get upgrade periodically?
I’ve had issues when I do a terminal update because I believe that Pop expects you to do an apt-get dist-upgrade
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. :-)
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.
Would be tricked if you just say “apple forced an update.”
RIP, this is sad day today
Out of curiosity what did you install ? And what did you install it on ?
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.
I changed my grandad onto GNU after I’ve distrohopped a few times on my system just so I knew how to do a system install (which is a skill in of itself no matter what OS you are installing)
All the major technical issues for install like getting to boot, display driver issues, etc are solved. Even Nvidia is reccomending people use their open source kernel modules (nvidia-open)
That was likely some kind of kdump error, interested to know what distro you used, I often advise people to use a stable but stale distro like a Debian based distro: Mint or Ubuntu is ideal for stability and ease of install.
I setup my grandad on Mint 2 years ago,was fine but decided to hop to Archlinux KDE Plasma as needed some newer stuff(if you enable the incremental backups its not hard to switch if you think a different one is a better fit), even though Archlinux has a reputation for less stability it’s been pretty good the last year, avoided AUR *mostly for stability, pamac for GUI updater.
Most of what he needs is in the browser and printing. (Printer issues are OS agnostic nowadays as modern printers seem to be very anti-consumer and they mostly use software to make their money, I.E DRM on ink cartridges)
Only issues my grandad had are printer or website related.
(Detail: used the CLI installer)
(DISCLAIMER: I am a qualified computing professional who have used GNU/Linux as daily driver since 2016, for newcomers a Debian based distro would be more the route I would).
