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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want to wake up in the morning to find my laptop not working?

This issue is exactly why I only occasionally install updates, and if I do I wait a while for the canaries to leave the coal mine. I've been a user of macOS, distros of Linux, and Windows for years, and in every one of them there was the inevitable update that made the OS unusable. It happens rarely but, when it does, it's a miserable experience.

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Interested in hearing about a Linux update that made the system unusable.

Are you kidding? I've had config files overwritten, x11/wayland/whatever just break after an update, wirelesss/power drivers just...change, sometimes to the point of having to recover it from a mono-screen tty, or updates fuck up the fs or something else that requires me to hit up single user mode.

Yeah, I got a black screen on boot on more than one occasion because of some change to either X11 or its config after updating. It's probably a rite of passage for a seasoned Linux user to figure out how to undo the damage to their `/etc/x11/xorg.conf`. (then again, I stopped using linux about 4 years ago, so maybe that's changed)

It has changed, yes. Most people don’t even have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file anymore; it’s all autodetected now.

Have been on Fedora for 10 years; the only thing that "reliably" breaks is the proprietary Nvidia driver.

Otherwise Linux is pretty damn rock solid. These days "it just works" applies to Linux more than any other OS.

And with the new Nvidia-less Dell Precision 5400 the system runs cool and quiet to boot.

Linux isn't what it used to be...

I recently had to work around https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1806329 by installing and selecting a specific (older) kernel. On affected versions, my wifi wouldn't come up.

Granted it wasn't strictly "bricked", but I think no-wifi meets some of the bars for unusable.

So yes, bad updates do happen.

The Linux 5.4 (LTS!) and 5.5 releases had consistent hangs on many Intel GPUs that use the i915 driver. I had to revert back to 4.19.x on my Linux machine.

https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F...

They should be fixed by now, but basically the latest LTS kernel was broken for 3-4 months on many Intel GPUs.

Last time I tried to update a Linux install I was trying to go from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, LTS to LTS. It crashed during the update and corrupted the initial install, throwing me back to grub to try to undo the damage.

Me too. People fail to grasp the difference between rendering the whole system unusable and just the OS.

On a PC pretty much the only thing that can brick the machine is a BIOS update.

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