Linux

Congratulations OP!

About a year and a half ago I nuked my root partition with sudo rm -rf /*. Fun times.

Welcome to the club, here's your penguin 🐧

I accidentally interrupted a system upgrade, breaking networking and package manager, among other important bits

Recently upgraded a laptop that had been on the shelf for 5 years up to latest version. Flawless one-step upgrade! nixos. Things never get in a tangle where installing and uninstalling packages leaves random artifacts behind. If you saved it to version control, you can return to a past system configuration and the only thing different is your home directory data.

And yes, if you have a home partition and root partition, that's exactly what you can do. That's the beauty of that approach. But back it up!

Back the hell up. Seriously. I cannot overstate how peaceful life is when your ass is properly covered.

I've done the same thing (Nvidia related) on a machine hooked up to an expensive scientific instrument. Didn't get any other work done that day... Ugh.

My pacman -Syu crashed on my old laptop and at this point I might just reinstall it, this time putting on some sort of a snapshot solution on it like on my main laptop

Try to fix it.

Yes.

I wouldn't do it without tests and "enough" experience.

I would backup first.

Then I would install an atomic distro because I wouldn't want to care about this ever again

I try to keep everything I care about in one folder that is backed up regularly, so it’s not such a big deal to reinstall the OS.

Spent half the day debugging wifi and kernel panic issues during boot. What finally fixed it was adding 5 sec delay to iwd service so wifi card firmware can do it's thing (or at least I think thats why it helped).

The best way to learn something is by hurting you.

Nice day to move to nixos ;)

What where some of the commands you where unsure of? Might be able to help if it's a common problem like smb sharing.