Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.
I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.
Hint: :q!
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Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.
I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.
Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.
It is definitely the case that I've had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I've also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn't an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).
It's funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren't so crippled. Similarly, you weren't so crippled if you couldn't use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.
These days, it's pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube -- obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat -- same problem.
Until you need a third running an entirely different distribution or OS
I had two laptops both set up very similarly, both Thinkpads on LMDE and running Tailscale.
Something broke my network setup on both of these laptops within the same day and it turned out to be Tailscale DNS conflicting with some other Linux network service, but I only learned that after using my phone to look online
Amateurs. I can search for fixes while my computer is still broken!
(ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, etc to switch to TTY, then lynx ddg.gg
to get to DuckDuckGo)
Isn't that what the second kernel is for?