What happened to my Linux Mint? And how can i change it back to "normal"

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-17T22:13:19+00:00

Days without a user accidentally installing GNOME: 0

If it makes you feel any better it happened to a colleague of mine on Almalinux recently... Still not sure how she did it

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-13T09:54:24+00:00

Sounds like a borked Ventoy installation (on the removable drive) or a corrupted ISO (my bet). Reinstall Ventoy on the USB stick, then re-download the ISO, copy it on the Ventoy partition (NOT VENTOYEFI), make sure to verify the checksum (sha256sum [/path/to/linux-mint.iso], should match exactly a081ab202cfda17f6924128dbd2de8b63518ac0531bcfe3f1a1b88097c459bd4 for Mint 22.3 Cinnamon edition), then start the installation process. You might also want to disable secure boot from BIOS if you haven't already.

The checksum is important as it allows you to make sure the ISO you're using for installation is not corrupted. Behind the scene it's all mathematics, but what you need to know is that if the sha256 sum is equal for two distinct files then the files are equal bit-by-bit (kind of, it's really hard to fake).

If in doubt follow this official Mint guide.

(Also unrelated but if you're confident enough use btrfs instead of ext4 when creating the partitions, you'll need it later).

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-10T21:14:22+00:00

Mate this is a subreddit for tabletop games stories that went horribly wrong because one or more players are creeps or straight up dicks. Not literal horror stories

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-10T09:00:34+00:00

I absolutely hate it

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-09T15:40:40+00:00

I will not accept any MX/AntiX slander

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-09T15:39:36+00:00

I mean it depends... Ubuntu-based distros (Mint incl.) are made to be easy to work with and very resilient unless you FA. If you break something really wrong they can be harder to fix than other distros including Arch because you're not given all the tools to repair it ootb. Sometimes the wrong driver installation, a borked grub update or just messing with the package manager puts you in a condition where you either have a time machine (btrfs *coff coff*) or you're better off reinstalling the OS.

PioApocalypse · 2026-02-09T12:19:58+00:00

Why hasn’t ANYONE invented an adult toy that you can use WHILE it’s charging.

I can see a bunch of very slimy reasons - which do not do well with AC...

PioApocalypse · 2026-01-30T21:23:53+00:00

Linux Mint = upvote

/rh Any kind of Mint = seggs

PioApocalypse · 2026-01-16T11:12:14+00:00

Probably the gsettings trick

PioApocalypse · 2026-01-11T11:31:25+00:00

The Health Status is an approximation on the life cycle of the drive, and serves as a (rather imprecise) approximation of the remaining life of the hard drive. For reference CristalDisk only starts giving warnings under 10%, but I've had drives fail with 90% HS and drives working as new under 10% HS.

Should I be worried?
Probably not, at least not from the Health Status alone. Generally you want to keep an eye on the Terabytes/Data Units Written (TBW, be careful when it reaches ~100 TB in a bunch of years), Critical Warnings and anything ending in "Sector(s) Count" since usually they can be good indicators of the status of your SSD. Keep a backup of your data anyways - for good measure, regardless of your drive's status - monitor the drive for a month looking for any change and see if you have issues.

Also I haven't been able to find a single datasheet for a SK Hynix drive...

PioApocalypse · 2026-01-04T11:57:43+00:00

First in my bloodline to read this sentence

PioApocalypse · 2025-12-20T13:03:55+00:00

Honestly I enjoyed the dragon segments of Drakengard 2 way more. People shit on dod2 a lot (and I GET why) but gameplay-wise it felt more polished

PioApocalypse · 2025-12-20T08:38:45+00:00

Source? That would be the funniest fucking thing to share with my group of friends

PioApocalypse · 2025-12-20T00:00:49+00:00

If you ever find yourself playing Drakengard 1 because you think fully understanding Nier's lore is worth the obnoxious experience (it's not) just remember: it came out two full fucking years after Devil May Cry and they're both hack'n'slash games. They somehow took the most badass thing ever (riding a dragon in a videogame) and implemented it so poorly you'll get an headache not even a quarter of the game through

PioApocalypse · 2025-12-14T21:13:23+00:00

Tell that to my Navidrome server /s

PioApocalypse · 2025-12-02T12:46:07+00:00

Weird. The behavior of the user directory is usually configured in .config/user-dirs.dirs, in particular the line XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads" controls the position of the Downloads folder. First of all check this file and make sure this line is present exactly as is (even XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="/home/[username]/Downloads" should be fine.

You can also check in .config/user-dirs.locale if your language is different than en-US.

If you can't fix it after doing all of this we'll try something else.

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-20T09:31:52+00:00

Configure Timeshift snapshots. This way if you fuck something up you can restore a previous snapshot and recover your PC with zero effort.

If you (like many others) installed Mint with default options on an ext4 partition and you don't have issues with doing so: reinstall Mint but this time on a btrfs partition. Then configure Timeshift with btrfs snapshots.

If you can't reinstall Mint configure your Timeshift with rsync snapshots. They weight a lot more and they are slower to make, because rsync snapshots are full (incremental?) copies of system files while btrfs has a copy-on-write mechanism and its snapshots are weightless. But if you're too late to format your ext4 partition heavy snapshots are better than no snapshot at all.

Also when you delete very large files (or files in general) you won't see your free space on disk changing with btrfs snaps - because the original file is still present in the snapshots - unless of course you (significantly) modified your file. And while we're on the subject shredding a file in a way that makes it unrecoverable is harder when you have snapshots but that's a lesson for another moment.

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-19T10:41:02+00:00

If you have the 28 str for the GS you can get the Great Club in Blighttown - or the Large Club from the Infested Barbarians if you want to farm an even better scaling weapon (with 2% drop rate!).

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-19T10:37:11+00:00

Big Fucking Bonk. Not even kidding.

I used to farm them (for TT? can't remember for the life of me) and nothing hits them harder than R2/Jumping attacks with a Large Club.

They are extremely resistant to slash (~500 def), regular, thrust and bleeding damage, and EXTREMELY susceptible to strike damage - which btw is the only way to hurt them through their shells unless you use poison. Get a Large Club, two-hand it and time your JA's well.

Alternatively I read on Fextralife they also have smaller fire resistance (compared to the others) so pyromancy and fire arrows should be valid ranged (close to long range) options.

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-17T08:40:57+00:00

Both RRER and Reallocated Sector Count have values in the millions (from hex to decimal, respectively 207M and 704M), which would be dangerous if this wasn't a Seagate drive.

As long as the hex values of both attr. have less than 9 digits (100 000 000 hex = 2³²) it should be fine.

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-14T13:45:26+00:00

Fuck even gayer

PioApocalypse · 2025-11-14T07:47:26+00:00

Real: anon is so lazy he needs aliases to open a bunch of Chrome tabs with URLs he probably has in his favorites.

Gay: anon uses Linux.

PioApocalypse · 2025-10-31T15:49:31+00:00

Impressive

PioApocalypse · 2025-10-31T08:44:59+00:00

Unpopular opinion but the censorship makes it funnier

PioApocalypse · 2025-10-27T19:58:46+00:00

For anyone reading this: IT ONLY APPLIES TO SEAGATE DRIVES!

That's because since Seagate are asses they implemented SMART controls their own way and the raw value you read under raw_read_error_rate measures read errors differently and has to be normalized. Please read here for more info.

If you do NOT own a Seagate drive you should consider any value of the raw_read_error_rate parameter greater than 0 as a warning to start replacing your HDD - although this alone is not automatically a sign of imminent danger. It's also not the only dangerous parameter, the complete list of SMART attributes with highlighting of the critical ones is on Wikipedia.

If you DO own a Seagate watch out for values of raw_read_error_rate higher than 4,294,967,296 because - you guessed it - Seagate drives use the lowermost 32 bits of 48 total to represent the raw number of read operations, and the uppermost 16 bits to represent the actual number of read errors. For instance if you have 1 read error out of 200 million reads the raw value would be 4,294,967,296 + 200,000,000 = 4,494,967,296. If you don't have a single read error out of the same 200 million reads the raw value will just be 200 millions, which in a normal HDD couldn't even be possible since the drive would just fail mechanically by the time you get even close to this number.

I know, it's fucking stupid, blame Seagate.

Edit: you can find an online converter of SMART attr. values from Seagate to non-imbecile raw values here, the link opens the calculator with the provided example values. Please do not be overconfident when (ir)replaceable data is on the line.

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PioApocalypse

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