Timeshift has turned my system breaking updates and tinkering into a non-issue. I just set up all my systems with it right off the bat. One snapshot per day, one weekly, and one monthly.
Since doing that, I've never had to toss a totally borked install.
I was one of the lucky users who used Manjaro on my old laptop for over a year and never had any real problems.
I was very confused when I started getting more involved in the Linux community and kept hearing about how terrible Manjaro was.
For me, vanilla Fedora has actually been the most consistently problematic distro. I've had more random issues getting it set up and working properly than any other distro.
God bless Mint though, it has been basically flawless for years.
You know what's funny about that? I can think of at 4 times in just the last year where a Microsoft outage caused significant downtime (at least 1 hour) for the company I work at.
Meanwhile, the 12 year old janky Debian servers I had were running Ansible, Docker, OpenProject, and several other services without a hitch, same with all the Linux endpoints I had deployed.
Centralization causes many of these problems and makes them more severe than they otherwise would be. When you are locked into a single vendor for everything you do, you're completely at their mercy if anything breaks.
The problem is that nobody, at least in the US, markets open source solutions. The big players corner the market, and IT just learn those big players. You should see the looks I've been given when I present IT directors with a quote from ix Systems for a TrueNAS solution to their storage needs. They have no idea who they are, even though they provide enterprise grade storage solutions at a fraction of the price of Dell or HP.
The US tech environment is a cyber dystopia controlled by the Tech corpos of silicon valley. It's so frustrating.
Yeah, it really bites. And no, they don't allow anything personal other than phones.
At least I get to use the Thinkpad, even if it is gimped with Windows. They initially weren't even going to allow that, because their company deploys only HP laptops.
But I made a strong and slightly pathetic case to the manager and he relented. Angry that I had to kiss the ring, but right now I need the money, and I really hated their clunky HP laptops.
For sure, I'm on it already.
Harsh but fair, edited lol.
Thank you, I might join in spirit heh 👊
Sadly, that's been my experience for years in IT, at least where I live in the US.
I rarely encounter an IT person who knows what Linux is beyond "a hacker OS" or some arcane system from the 80's that's still running deep in a basement somewhere.
FOSS = janky freeware in their minds. They've usually never even heard of XCP-ng, OpenShift, TrueNAS, Bitwarden, PFSense, or any of the other professionally supported and enterprise-grade open source technologies.
For sure, already reaching out to recruiters and applying to some job postings.
Thank you 🫶
I am careful, but not concerned. The new company's IT doesn't give a damn about anything that I set up or implemented. Their reactions when I was describing my work and job role before the buyout was essentially, "Aww, the cute little sysadmin was making scripts and using Linux, isn't that sweet."
As far as they're concerned, all the old hardware and software are e-waste and are being scrapped. They are ripping out everything, literally. From our phone system, to our physical devices, to our firewalls, network switches, Active Directory, and file server.
They are replacing every single part of our infrastructure. Everything I built is useless in their eyes.
1 in 10? Those are rookie numbers! We gotta pump those numbers up!