this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Just switched to Fedora Kinoite and I’m loving the immutability of the OS. Oh bad update? lol rollback and golden. Can’t do that shit with each bloatware force push from MS
I mean, good thing, too. They just broke the lock screen this week. That was an annoying half an hour of troubleshooting to do in the middle of a work day.
Pros and cons in each, I suppose.
Who did? I didn't quite follow.
A KDE update broke its lock screen. Locking the computer would bring up a message reading "The lock screen is broken and doesn't work anymore, to unlock the computer, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1, login and enter this command."
Interesting that there's a "failsafe" like that though.
Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.
Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.
That used to be the "but you have to use the terminal" of very early Linux, back when "can you install Debian from scratch?" was the old "can you install Arch from scratch?"
Man, I'm old.
It's a thing on hyprlock as well 🙂 If I ssh into my desktop and kill hyprlock, it will give me instructions on how to get it running again.
Yeah actual error messages with helpful information are a thing on Linux.
The last time I tried to install Windows on something, there was some problem with the BIOS config, and Windows would get part of the way through installing and then a "FAILED TO INSTALL ERROR 0xA9BF4DAFDEB99B7AD46" or something. Installing Linux on the same machine said "Unable to install due to BIOS config. See here for details." "here" was a hyperlink to the Ubuntu wiki, which you could open in Firefox because this is a live session with the whole desktop there, not some useless installer environment, nevertheless it gave a QR code to the same wiki page so you could visit it on a mobile device if you wanted to.
It's like it's meant to be used by humans, not the Borg. And not even like Borg Queen Seven of Nine Borg, like TNG era Borg.
Yeah, I don't know who made the offending changes. I don't think it's fixed yet, I'm using a workaround at the moment.
I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn't rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I'm using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn't break and I'm not sure I have a way to tell when it's fixed other than manually checking.
Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.
Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn't have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn't have been just... wrong, or mismatched.
Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because... well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn't have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.
And cloudstike did never happen...
I have Timeshift setup for fast and easy rollback.
Bad updates will happen to any OS. It is about if you want to update fast and having a rollback plan. There are dostros that updates more slow as they actually do their own testing and hence was not affected at all.
For me the lock screen instructions worked fine. The kernel update only broke Ghostty but a workaround fix was available the same day. I could also just have booted into the older kernel from Grub.
It did happen, but that wasn't an OS update, it was a third party update that bricked the OS. The fact that it could do that exposed some Windows practices that are a bigger deal than Linux's general jankyness when they happen, but they also surface less often for end users.
I thought this particular boo-boo was revelatory because Linux is relatively on the ball anticipating updates breaking the system entirely (one wonders if it should have to be, but whatever). But this was a widespread but specific issue within a random system component. Without googling for it an end user wouldn't immediately understand what's going on, and even then there was a fair amount of confusion for at least a day. There wasn't "a workaround", there were serveral, as normies and newer users struggled to understand what had broken and how to fix it, and people weren't very clear in reporting what worked and what didn't. This all happened within forums and bug reports, with no central source of information or even a centralized official organization informing of the status. Definitely not how that would have played out in a commercial environment, for better and worse.
Also, this is a slight tangent, but can I flag a couple of frequent Linux community behaviors you're engaging in here that I wish we would get rid of?
One, "it works in my machine" is a meaningless statement. It adds nothing to the conversation and it doesn't mean the issue is less important. It works on your machine, your version or your distro but not in others. That is every bug, it adds no useful information. In this case, a static screen contains specific instructions that report a common default but don't match implementation on every distro, so this warning screen isn't always accurate. That, in itself, is a problem.
Two, "here's all the smart stuff I did to fix it" (or the smart stuff I do to prevent it) is also entirely useless. The issue came and went, everybody fixed it. The goal isn't to work around the OS or the DE's jankiness, it is to have it not be janky in the first place. Putting the onus on the user to fix the shortcomings of the product is... a mitigation, I guess, but the goal is to compete with the paid alternatives on a mass scale, which has different requirements. Complaints about a wonky area of Linux shouldn't be dismissed or excused with offers to teach people manual workarounds or even best practices, they should be addressed with fixes from the developers of the components that have issues.
Bad updates don't happen on Bazzite. Immutable distros have solved this problem.
It is less likely to have. But software can still have bugs, big or small. The difference is just how much testing has to be done before you say it is good enough. Immutable dostros were not immune to KDE 6.0 bugs were if you upgrades from KDE 5 it completely broke. The issue were that you had to clear the cache in the users home folder for KDE. See Chris Titus YouTube channel about this were he did exactly this with Immutable distro.
Maintainers, I guess, as in, the update that was rolled out, was broken for some users. But I don't know if that's the case here
I meant MS or KDE.
Been running Bazzite for a while now, and love it. Basically Kinoite but built for gaming.
Took me a little bit to get a grasp on ostree, but I really like it.
Just wanna add another Bazzite recommendation! If you're on the fence and feeling like "but my games!" - Bazzite's got your back. Shit works great.