I'd like to use Linux but...

Tried some fixes but in the end went for the full reinstall and now I just don't get the option to dual boot, it goes straight to windows. I've reinstalled again, deleted the old install and reinstalled, terminated the partition with extreme prejudice and reinstalled, purged and reinstalled grub2 from the ubuntu usb. Nothing. Fuck windows, fuck linux, fuck all computers.

even after 20 years of using Linux as my main driver, the boot process is still a mystery to me. i had to temporarily install window$ for a dual boot last month and it completely took over my boot process.

burn rEFInd to a usb stick and it should let you boot your linux partition: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
from there it's a matter of mounting your EFI partition, reinstalling grub onto it, and then hopefully it'll resolve itself. i blame window$ for being a bad citizen

these steps should work: https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstall

installed ubuntu now. NOt sure of drawbacks yet. It does at least recognise the new internal hard drive taht Linux couldn't mount permanently . But it was there at installation so not sure if that would be why..
Have yet to find out if camera will be recognised. But fingers crossed.
Anyway hoping that this si less frustrating than Linux has been for various reasons.
& there are other OSes that I've yet to explore. Anybody use anything else for a PC type desktop that they'd recommend?

So why did Windoze stop talking to the internet though ?

(just sounds like it would be easier to maybe fix that instead)

preferable definitely, or i'd lose access to photoshop and lightroom (about the only things worth keeping windows for). easier? hmm. where linux is arcane and complicated, windows is obscure and secretive.

you're all getting Chromebooks for the holidays

am working on a chromebook now, it's fine except the screen is half the size of my desktop, feel like i'm peering through a glass darkly.

these steps should work: https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstall

thanks, will try them once i've worked up the will power.

Stevolende, is that disk formatted NTFS or something? If you're gone full Linux, would be good to back it up then format ext4. Though if you want to read it easily on Windows at some point, then fat32 or exfat

People asking about other alternate OSes, I'm at a loss. My Chromebook "recommendation", I mean, that's also Linux, like Android is as well. Mint and Ubuntu are the easiest things you'll find for full featured* Linux installs... much better than the days when new users were recommended something like Mandrake or Redhat. Steveolende, what did you try before Ubuntu?

* I think it's worth considering how basic you'd like to make things and go with that. I'm using Mint with basic 'window manager' xfce, as opposed to the fancy Gnome or KDE variants. I gave my parents the Cinnamon version as a more user friendly looking compromise (it does the best job of a "Start" menu bar that I've ever seen)... to my slight surprise, it gives all of us less grief than Windows.

I've heard good things about the distribution "elementaryOS" as far as simplifying goes as well.

I've just been dabbling in this stuff a long time. If computers were my job I wouldn't have the patience at all

tried running a linux machine back in 2007. it didn't do a bad job, but when something went wrong my only recourse was The Community. the thing about "volunteers", you know, there's a question of motivation, and what a lot of them get out of it is the ability to feel superior and to gatekeep, the sort of people who refer to anyone who isn't an expert on the workings of their operating system as a "luser" (it's a unix joke, ha ha, get it?)

hate to invoke the "tanstaafl" cliche, but in the case of linux i find it to be true. i can handle everything about linux but the fucking attitude.

yeah, brutal. I even try to read as little as I can get away with online when I do have issues.

Has anyone tried Hackintosh? I'm not into the Mac OS but that could be another option.

allegedly, all you need to do to get an answer from Linux nerd community is to pose the question like this:

"it's really easy to do <x> on Windows, but you can't do it on Linux, what a pile of shit"

isn't stackoverflow yer one stop shop for all flavours of computer problems now?

haha xp

Just been reminded what prompted me to move off Windows 7. Avast installed a free trial of premium that screwed up some functions on the machine.
They've just billed me and taken money about 2 months after I had to move off windows because of them.i thought I was told they'd extended beyond the trial and cancelled particularly as I have not used the service on my desktop since it messed up. Phone apparently has same account though. Aaargh

i'm old enough to remember lilo, the thing grub replaced.

linux installs did get a lot easier - nobody's compiling their own kernels anymore - until UEFI came along and put a (intel- / microsoft-shaped) spanner in the works.

(then there was unity and systemd and wayland and a bunch of other things that didn't help. i fear change. which is why i run mint mate)

it's also a good idea not to use too new a laptop - the nvidia card on this one caused some problems initially and the wireless. the community fixed it quite quickly though.

we should all just use os/2

OpenBSD all the way baybee

we should all just use os/2

― L'assie (Euler)

half an os for half a computer lolllll

everybody knows the one true operating system is TempleOS

Had to look up that TempleOS

"... If I want to code an OS that uses interpretive dance as the input method, I should be allowed to do so..."

(I should add that's not what TempleOS is about, just a funny quote from the wiki)

I needed something to do to distract me from relentless misery, so perhaps unwisely I decided to wipe my ancient windows 7 laptop and stick Mint on it. It actually worked first time! And it's a lot faster and the fan is quieter. Sorry to besmirch you Mint. Guessing perhaps VMWare or Virtual Box or whatever it was I used before was the problem.

Hope your installation lasts longer than the new govt.
Had to move off it after a month and a half myself. BUt could be this computer and not being able to get photos off a digital camera, or direct files to restore on a disc too.So your experience may well be different.

I pasted a

mkdir -p WHATEVER

-p

rmdir -- -p
rmdir ./-p
rmdir -- ./-p
rm -rf -- -p
rm -rf -- ./-p

The rmdir commands all result in

rmdir: failed to remove './-p': No such file or directory

-p

rm -rf

try rm -rfi * which will delete everything but prompt you first. so reply no for the things you want to keep and yes for that one directory.

** test it on a /tmp directory first, I'm not sure how rf and i will interact **

also i find using command line completion is sometimes handy so rmdir and hit tab and it'll list the directories *including any escape characters it needs to deal with the special characters*. useful if the filenames include spaces or brackets etc

just want to say oof and <3, i hate this shit

If you've copied and pasted from somewhere my first thought (backed up by my complete inability to create a directory called -p even with single quotes, double quotes, escaping) is that the - is not in fact a normal dash character but some kind of fancy Unicode en-dash as copied and pasted from something e.g. written on a Mac or in Word.

If you copy the directory name directly from the output of ls, then
ls -d <paste directory name>
(you may need to add quote marks but it worked for me without) does it return just that one directory? Can you then rmdir it by pasting?

(the -d tells it to show you the details for the directory and not the files in it)

(Or you can check the weird character theory by piping the output of ls into the hex byte viewer tool hexdump, e.g. if you run this ls command:
ls -d ?p/ | hexdump -C

NB If it says "No such file or directory" try "ls -d *p | hexdump -C" but that will also pick up any other directory names ending in p - the ? should only match one character, but if it's a really weird character or your encoding settings are wrong ? may not work.

To test I've created a filename which is –p where the – is an en-dash character I copied off a webpage and the results I see are:

00000000 e2 80 93 70 2f 0a |...p/.|

The 70 is the p character, 2f is / and 0a is the final newline, so the mysterious character is E2 80 93 in utf-8 (Ubuntu's default encoding). Whereas if the character is actually a regular - character you should see:

00000000 2d 70 2f 0a |-p/.|

You don't necessarily have the same E2 80 93 dash character but if the hexdump output is longer than the bottom version then it's some kind of non-ascii character.)

I'm lazy and always deleted/renamed those with mc or if it's not installed then whatever GUI file manager is available.

ls -li to get the inode number of the directory
find . -type d -inum ### -exec rm '{}' \;
where you replace ### in the second command with the einode number that was in the output of the first command

That works anytime you have a file or directory with weird characters in the name

If you've copied and pasted from somewhere my first thought (backed up by my complete inability to create a directory called -p even with single quotes, double quotes, escaping) is that the - is not in fact a normal dash character but some kind of fancy Unicode en-dash as copied and pasted from something e.g. written on a Mac or in Word.

I think this was it. I just ls'ed the parent dir, copied the offending dir, and a rmdir was able to get rid of it with no fuss. Thanks!

migrating thunderbird mail to a new distro... create a new profile, tell it to use the common drive rather than the distro-specific drive, only it's not obvious it wants a profile directory, not the directory that the profiles go in (like making my home directory /home rather than /home/koogy). so now if i delete the new profile it'll nuke ALL profiles. luckily i noticed and corrected it.

bit of a panic when the Mail directory looked completely empty, 10 years of emails gone, before i realised .thunderbird is hidden because of the leading dot.

but at least they've fixed the zoom now