Why I am starting to hate Linux.

[Bob Proulx]

Brian Sturgill wrote:
> Don't get me wrong, I like Linux better than The long and short of
> it is that I blew away my EFI partition. I realized it about 2
> seconds too late.

Ouch!  We have all been there.  I did something similar but different
about a month ago.  Darn it!

> So being an experienced systems programmer/admin, I used the new
> drive to backup up everything just in case. And then started looking
> into how to rebuild the EFI on the off chance I can get things
> working again. And low and behold, it's pretty easy and I did
> so... though I'm not sure I had it all right because when I
> rebooted, I booted, but systemd (the abomination from hell) got
> caught in a loop.

I ranted about systemd again this week.  It failed to shutdown a
system.  Got hung trying to reboot because it got stuck trying to
shutdown.  An init system should never hang!  Especially when shutting
down.  Because if it does not shut down then it can't reboot up again!

> Catch grub at just the right place and type <ESC> to get the grub menu.
> My fast system, using default Ubuntu setup has about a 1-2 second window to
> type the escape.

The embedded world most often calls it "Dark Boot".  That's where you
don't see any informational messages on the screen between power on
and full functionality.  I absolutely HATE Dark Boot.

Whenever I get a new system I always do a few things.  I walk through
every page of the BIOS to get an understanding of it.  And every
vendor uses a different key sequence to get there.  Is it Del?  Is it
Escape?  Is it F1?  F8?  F12?  It's all and any of those depending
upon the vendor.  Argh!  And if I have a slow waking up monitor I
might not ever see any display of what key I need to hit!  I have had
to swap monitors before in order to see the POST (Power On Self Test)
screen with those keys listed.

I always set POST Delay to be 5 seconds.  That's long enough for
monitors to wake up from power save so that I can read the display and
see the option keys for actions.  Otherwise my monitors don't wake up
before the system has moved on.  And I always turn on boot messages,
sometimes configured as a splash screen cover.  I want to see the POST
messages!

Then when I install the OS I always ensure that GRUB has a 5 second
timeout before selecting the kernel to boot.  For Debian and
derivatives this is GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 in /etc/default/grub and then
running "update-grub" to compile it into the boot files.  That's the
default for Debian and Devuan but some other distributions default to
zero seconds and boot immediately.  I absolutely HATE that!  That
sounded like what you experienced.

I also set GRUB_TERMINAL=console most often to disable the splash
screen graphical cover.  I want to see the boot time messages.  I want
to see a reasonable sized font.  Not some micro small graphical font.
Plus I hate Dark Boot.  I may have mentioned that.

> If you hold escape down, then you end up in the grub command line which
> seems to be useless.
> If you don't type escape fast enough you boot the broken Ubuntu... and have
> to force it back down [a 2 minute process].
> If you type escape too fast it gets dropped.

I feel your pain.  I have been there too many times myself.  Ugh.

> You then select "Ubuntu" and then very carefully type a "e" , then go to
> the end of the line and add:
>    systemd.unit=rescue.target

I haven't been there.  If I need to rescue systemd then I boot the
installer and use it as rescue media to rescue the system.

> All told it took me an hour to figure out how to get into single user mode.
> Search through all of /var/log... cannot find out why the systemd services
> are failing.

I use and recommend booting the installer and using it for a rescue
system.  It's just less frustrating.  Because of exactly the problems
you are describing.

> At this point I punt on recovery and am going for a reinstall.  I
> think about it, decide I'll try Devuan (a non-systemd Linux)... but
> it won't boot off a USB stick. I follow all of its (very sparse)
> directions, but nothing. I'm guess it might be it doesn't do
> EFI... but it's just a guess.

I migrated from Debian to Devuan on my systems.  That allows me to
leverage all of my Debian experience and knowledge.  Devuan uses the
Debian installer.  And therefore will support booting any system that
Debian supports.  Which does include UEFI systems.  And booting from
USB too.  I don't know why you suffered such difficulties because
Devuan will install and boot UEFI okay.

> In the meantime, I did more systemd related searching. It seems that snap
> and flatpack require systemd. Ugh... too many things requiring these...

Yes.  Snaps and flatpacks are Ubuntu things and Ubuntu has embraced
systemd and both of those things pretty much require systemd and in
particular systemd-logind.  Pretty much locked in there.  However Arch
also has a way to run them there too, apparently, since they are both
systemd based distributions.

> OK, back to Ubuntu Mate... moving up to Jammy Jellyfish (20.0 to 22.0).

If you need snaps and flatpacks then you might as well just grin and
bear it and run Ubuntu.  Or I guess Arch for the Arch users works too.

> Now for the biggest frustration. For YEARS I've been running firefox with
> about 8 profiles.
...another tale of woe about iconify and de-iconify...

I offer sympathy.  I am not using icons for anything so haven't seen
this.  But I feel your pain.

Bob