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My lived experience is just wildly different from yours and stretches from shortly after 9/11 to about 2019 when I swore off partitions. > The only time I ever

My lived experience is just wildly different from yours and stretches from shortly after 9/11 to about 2019 when I swore off partitions. > The only time I ever had any boot issues is when I was mucking with Grub configs and I didn't really know what I was doing. Why were you mucking with Grub configs? Because something went wrong. Why did you know what you were doing? Because it was far from the first time something had gone wrong. Beware the rose-tinted glasses.

tombert 3y ago
> Why were you mucking with Grub configs? Because something went wrong. Because I needed to enable a driver, actually, and something on the Arch forums or AskUbuntu said that I could enable it in a boot parameter in my grub config. I cannot remember the specific driver, but it was absolutely not to fix any boot partition issues. Also, I explicitly stated that I didn't know what I was doing in the comment you're replying to. Please don't get me wrong; I really don't have any rose-tinted glasses in regards to Linux. I'm basically a Mac person now; my work computer is a Mac M3, my home computer is a MacBook i9. I do have NixOS dual-booted on my personal computer, and it's been a nightmare to get all the drivers working. Just kidding, they still don't work, because the Linux drivers for the T2 MacBooks are garbage. There's a good chance that I will be nuking the Linux partitions this weekend in all honesty. The only thing that runs Linux full time in my house is my server, which runs a NixOS install on a tmpfs root. It's not like I have a ton of love for Linux, if I did I would probably still be using it for my daily driver, but I just haven't had the dual-boot-partition issues that people complain about. Maybe it's because I so rarely actually went to Windows, but grub more or less did the job. I will acknowledge that getting Linux installed in a secureboot environment continues to be a pain, however.
- smallmancontrov 3y ago
  Windows is usually the side that causes problems, so if you stayed out of it or supervised the updates that could be why. The most common killer combo is that Windows tries an update, reboots as part of it, and the reboot unexpectedly (from Windows point of view) goes into Linux. Some time later you log into Windows, it looks at the clock, realizes the reboot didn't go as planned, and flips its shit into some kind of hare-brained recovery process that winds up overwriting your bootloader with something that can't load Linux and can't load Windows either. It doesn't happen every time so clearly there are heuristics, but it definitely happens some of the time because the dead windows loader it leaves behind is distinctive and unmistakable. That said, I've seen both Ubuntu and Fedora updates that automatically fixed the bootloader until it was broken, so it's wrong to fingerpoint too hard here. The upshot is that "leave bootloader on boot drive alone" isn't part of the implicit operating system social contract, but "leave bootloader on non-boot drive alone" is, so you can solve a big hairy software problem with a small hardware investment.

tombert 3y ago

> Why were you mucking with Grub configs? Because something went wrong. Because I needed to enable a driver, actually, and something on the Arch forums or AskUbuntu said that I could enable it in a boot parameter in my grub config. I cannot remember the specific driver, but it was absolutely not to fix any boot partition issues. Also, I explicitly stated that I didn't know what I was doing in the comment you're replying to. Please don't get me wrong; I really don't have any rose-tinted glasses in regards to Linux. I'm basically a Mac person now; my work computer is a Mac M3, my home computer is a MacBook i9. I do have NixOS dual-booted on my personal computer, and it's been a nightmare to get all the drivers working. Just kidding, they still don't work, because the Linux drivers for the T2 MacBooks are garbage. There's a good chance that I will be nuking the Linux partitions this weekend in all honesty. The only thing that runs Linux full time in my house is my server, which runs a NixOS install on a tmpfs root. It's not like I have a ton of love for Linux, if I did I would probably still be using it for my daily driver, but I just haven't had the dual-boot-partition issues that people complain about. Maybe it's because I so rarely actually went to Windows, but grub more or less did the job. I will acknowledge that getting Linux installed in a secureboot environment continues to be a pain, however.

smallmancontrov 3y ago
Windows is usually the side that causes problems, so if you stayed out of it or supervised the updates that could be why. The most common killer combo is that Windows tries an update, reboots as part of it, and the reboot unexpectedly (from Windows point of view) goes into Linux. Some time later you log into Windows, it looks at the clock, realizes the reboot didn't go as planned, and flips its shit into some kind of hare-brained recovery process that winds up overwriting your bootloader with something that can't load Linux and can't load Windows either. It doesn't happen every time so clearly there are heuristics, but it definitely happens some of the time because the dead windows loader it leaves behind is distinctive and unmistakable. That said, I've seen both Ubuntu and Fedora updates that automatically fixed the bootloader until it was broken, so it's wrong to fingerpoint too hard here. The upshot is that "leave bootloader on boot drive alone" isn't part of the implicit operating system social contract, but "leave bootloader on non-boot drive alone" is, so you can solve a big hairy software problem with a small hardware investment.