Journal – December 5, 2025
Today I learned (again) why I’ll never fully trust any other operating system.
I was in the middle of upgrading an old, non-supported Ubuntu release straight to the latest LTS. Not the cleanest move, I know, but sometimes you just want to get it done. Halfway through the do-release-upgrade, the power blinked. Not a brownout, not a flicker; full blackout for a solid 30 seconds. When the UPS finally gave up and the machine shut down hard, I just stared at the dark screen and thought: “Well, that’s probably bricked.”
Rebooted… and got dropped straight into emergency mode. No graphical target, no display manager, just a sad little console login on a black screen. Classic “oh crap” moment.
Fifteen years ago this would have been panic territory. Today? I grabbed a coffee, plugged in a random USB stick with the same LTS ISO, booted into the live session, chrooted into the busted install, reinstalled grub, fixed a couple of broken packages with apt --fix-broken install, regenerated the initramfs, and twenty minutes later I was back at my desktop like nothing happened.That’s the part proprietary OS users will never understand. When Windows bluescreens itself into oblivion during an update, you’re at the mercy of whatever recovery environment Microsoft felt like giving you that year, and half the time your only option is “reset this PC” (read: maybe lose your data). On Linux, even when the system is catastrophically broken, your files are just sitting there on the disk, perfectly accessible, because everything is a file and you always have a root shell if you want it.The machine might forget how to boot, but it can never forget where your /home is.
Power failures, botched upgrades, accidental rm -rf nightmares; doesn’t matter. A $5 USB stick and a little command-line kung fu and you’re back in business. Your data never leaves your drive, never gets uploaded to some cloud recovery service, never depends on a vendor’s servers being online.This is the beauty of Linux. It respects you enough to let you fix it when it breaks, and it trusts you to own your own stuff.
Still running the LTS I fought for today. Feels like a badge of honor now.