I have often wondered what people do to their computer to break it? I have a windows 7 install that is a couple of years old at this point. And my linux install is an unbroken series of debian upgrades going about 7 years.
Break? What fantasy is that? I'm running five machines of different ages for years now, every day. Nothing is breaking; certainly not because of the OS. What does that even mean?
I messed up my parent's computer so many times, that my uncle (the family IT guy) just left the set of floppies so I could re-install it myself. I inevitably kept breaking Windows 95 every 8 months or so.
I've found myself setting up a new Windows install - sometimes VM, sometimes bare metal - every 4-8 weeks for the past 6 months and it's sooooo painful. My computer is a vehicle for getting work done - just let me use the damn thing.
How do ordinary people manage bung up their systems so badly that the thing to do is reinstall the whole thing?
And this happens often enough that it’s worth carrying around a tool to do this? I thought that by now systems would be adequately armoured against this.
I just had to go and fix my mum's PC after Windows updates broke printing and photo imports. Between Microsoft and Dell they managed to install a ton of garbage that needed removing.
I'd put Linux on it but she is set in her ways and struggles with any changes.
Yesterday, I "fixed" a two-year-old Windows 10 notebook computer. It's a cheaper model with one physical CPU core. As far as I could tell, there was no actual malware on it, just Windows and some terrible antivirus package that came with the machine. It hadn't been used all that heavily. Nonetheless, it took 15 minutes to boot and another 15 to present a usable desktop. Even with the AV disabled, the system was still basically unusable. I fixed it by installing Arch with XFCE. (It's in my household, so I'm not worried about the perils of nontechnical users failing to maintain the install.)
I'm disgusted by this situation. This was supposed to be a simple email-checker. But without anybody making any serious mistakes in its administration, (terrible AV software notwithstanding) it had degraded to the point of uselessness in two years and was headed for the dumpster. (There was still plenty of space on the hard disk, and as I said, no evidence of malware.) I could only conclude that the computer was behaving exactly as it was designed to. Under Linux, this computer remains perfectly suitable for its purpose. It's quite responsive even when running a modern web browser, and I have a whole separate rant about how insane web browsers have become.
At any rate, it's quite sensible that people don't apply updates, when updates literally make the computer impossible to use. This being Windows 10, there was no avoiding updates, but I can see why Windows 7 users wouldn't bother with them.
It's all fun and games until you break the very expensive family computer (and when your parents have written instructions for the sequence of magic commands to run various programs and don't understand the directory tree, "breaking" it can mean a lot of things) and have to figure out how to fix it. With no Google to consult. :-)
Meh hasn’t happened yet but I’d just buy a new one. That being said, I always also have a windows and Linux machine, they’re just not my daily drivers.
Ran a fair bit of Windows 95 back in the day, and a bit of 98 before ditching and going all-out Linux. Did weird shit to those systems, had my liberal share of blue screens and reboots and facepalms and shouting at my CRT. Also frequent reinstalls because things inevitably grew crufty and polluted beyond repair. But these were planned and deliberate. I never once had a system die on me.
I was using windows for years, both in work and at home. It never ever break up that often for me. Serious question: what is breaking up that often for all? I mean, which part of the system, what it does when it breaks?
Usually never. I will list a few systems that are there in my home:
1. My personal laptop: I did an Windows 10 erase and install when I purchased it to get rid of the junk, and split the hard drive for a dual boot. I also installed Fedora initially, but a month later shifted to Debian 11, and have not touched that since. It has been 6 months.
2. My wife's laptop: It is very old - maybe 10 years. It used to run Windows till 2017. Then it fell into disuse due to a hard drive failure. I revived it with an SSD around the time Linux Mint 20 released, installed it, and it has never been erased since.
3. My father's and father-in-law's computers: These aren't in my home, but I manage them. They are also a few years old. They run Debian. Started with 9 I think. I updated them to 10 and then to 11. They work flawlessly too.
4. Phones: I erased my phone (Oneplus 6) only once after Oneplus stopped updates to install LineageOS. Others haven't been erased since they've been bought. All are over 3.5 years old.
I might have agreed with you up to ~2 months ago (my 2 Win7 installs had been running for 3-4 years each) until a real, normal, official Radeon graphics card update completely hosed the install. Unusable and unrecoverable from the save point thing, whatever it's called.
Sure, it happens rarely - but it really depends on your usage patterns. If you often have to try out software on a regular basis (I've always used Windows VMs for work stuff when I needed to evaluate things from $randomVendor) it might accelerate this. Or sometimes it's a piece of hardware. yes, some are 90s tales but to some degrees it has persisted.
I go years without "performing some kind of maintenance on my Linux desktop environment". I can't even imagine what you would even be trying to fool with, and it not working.
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