On Mon, 25 Aug 2025 17:22:29 +0200
Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

> Le 23/08/2025 à 14:42, Simon via Dng a écrit :
> >> The time when one could loose data because of filesystem failure is gone,
> > Really ? Did I miss the news that reality has given in to wishful thinking ? Yes, I know things are a lot more reliable than they used to be (my memory goes back to Ext2 without journalling, and other systems) but nothing is infallible.
>     I never experienced a filesystem failure since the advent of the
> first journaling filesystem, Reiserfs. 20y ago or even more. Compared to
> other accidents, this is therefore negligible. And, anyway, loosing one
> partition, eg /var, would leave the package manager in a very dirty state.

Unless you have a list of installed packages made with:

dpkg --get-selections

and you can reinstall everything so that the system is in a coherent
state again. Running debsums afterwards helps to see if you missed
some package still in a corrupt state.

>
> >> and, when the OS is badly broken, it may be easier to re-install than to repair it.

I love linux because almost every time you can repair your system,
reinstalling is so windooze-like.

> > It doesn’t need to be badly broken, even minor issues can stop the system booting. Having a more or less static /boot makes it easy to drop into a terminal and fix things - using the tools (and versions) appropriate to the system*.
>
>     By "badly broken", I mean that, at either you can't boot it or fix
> it up with some alternative boot method, or the package manager if so
> f...ed up that you're unable to recover. The last happened a few times
> to me.
>
> --     Didier

Ciao,
Tito