Let's start with my rig. I have a very basic work set up with a Ryzen 5 5600G, an asrock AM-B650 AM4, 32gigs of G skill DDR4 and a Samsung EVO 970 Gen3 512.
I installed ubuntu 4 months ago as my base OS.
Because of the small base HDD, what is actually still very much enough for me, as I filled it up only till like 200gigs, I did not use installation security partitioning, so home, var, etc are all on the same base partition.
I started having little glitches the moment I started using multiple work-spaces and hot corners. Sometimes this resulted in just image freezing for maybe 20 second, then logging me out, sometimes completely rebooting. My system is always up to date. My major activity on the PC is learning and testing. Virtual box, Boxes, software testing, and some basic video editing. I monitor my PCs temp, so I never actually really go over 60°C and most of the time it stays well under 50°C.
Anyways, I happened to still succeed in crashing Ubuntu in multiple instances weekly when trying out something new. I think that the harmony between packages and package-managers are not that sound. There are can .deb or .appimage files that you download from the internet, you can use apt as a package manager, flatpak and snap as package manager systems. If you did not find still whatever you need you could still install yum, dnf and npm. The mix and match, forgotten updates or forgotten type of installs create a kind of a mess. The ease of use time to time makes you forget about future stability.
One advice. If you wanted to keep your ubuntu pristine, stick to APT, .deb downloads and compiling from source. Don't use snap and flatpak if you can avoid and add safe a and secure apt repositories so you can enlarge your updates for your downloads.
Finally, I messed up something while playing around with drivers and installation of Openshot and OBS. This sounds very basic, but at the end the GDM3 failed so miserably that I could not stand up the system. Gnome Display Manager - GDM3 error.
After succeeding downloading the best packages and installing them for me for proper OBS and Openshot use, I did a reboot and boom. GDM3 failed.
I did the necessary to make the system stand up, but before the CLI was shutdown too, I made a quick boot USB-key for debian net-install from command line. Non of this is easy as my internet is a usb-tethered 4g+ one right now, so when ubuntu shuts down my connection, I have to rewrite my netplan yum file as the name of my driver changes every time.
I like challenges so I played around with my CLI for like 8hours. I one by one uninstalled all packages and removed all GNOME related stuff. Everything. I uninstalled all software. I mean all and everything. No libreoffice, thunderbird, like nothing. I uninstalled system software like open-ssh client and server, ufw, rkhunter, all. Then did a reboot, system health and memory check from cli.
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-$(uname -r)
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-headers-$(uname -r)
$ sudo update-grub
I tried installing lightdm first, but did not work, so reinstalled "gnome everything" with all AMD drivers for my VEGA. Nothing. GDM3 error.
Then I repeated the process by trying to use KDE instead of gnome, but that made a mass too. Anyway, I had fun in trying out saving my system and learnt a lot.
One thing to take away from this experience. Basically if the kernel is not compromised, nearly every time you can have a CLI. If you had a CLI, your data is not lost. Probably if I went deeper in error analysing and checking the logs for more info, it would have been possible to make my system stand up, but after 8hours of checking back and forth my phone, I had enough and just installed Debian as my next, future proof OS. Will see how long it will last. I have very little important data and I store most of that in txt files and back that up on my dropbox and proton cloud so I am not worried about testing out new linux distros as my main os. I am running the latest Fedora on my laptop too and as I do little fidgeting on it, it stays very stable and fast, but with ton of updates. Will see, but I am keen to try Manjaro as I heard a lot of good stuff about it too.
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