Published 2025-01-18
tag(s): #failures #linux #meta
A tale of grief, failure, and moving on.
In more than one way.
I mentioned in my last post that I was taking an unexpected trip. I am now back "home". Buenos
Aires feels like "home", too. And honestly it is hard for me to say which one is more home
than the other. It flips?
Also we've been in Jersey City for a bit over a year. I still think of Denver as "home"
sometimes, because of friends and familiar places and my football team[2].
Yet I don't feel like going back, usually. 10 years is a long time to stay in a
place if you don't have at least some attachment...
This time in particular, I had personal reasons to (try to) stay longer in Buenos Aires, but I
felt the pull of my house, my family...I am not sure why, I just wanted to be here.
And now that I am back - now what? Now I get to deal with my own grief.
Now for something more mundane and less vague.
I was distracted, removing partitions from a Micro SD card while chatting with my dad. I was
flying a few hours later, and when the laptop prompted me for a password, I just typed it with
no second thought. Then realized...why did I get that prompt?
Well, turns out I deleted the boot partition[1] from my main drive, not
the SD card. I tried to restore things to a previous state, but this was one of those
instances where running Silverblue as opposed to plain old Fedora Workstation meant that I had
to follow different instructions, and time was running out, and I couldn't find the exact
steps...and...
I guess that if I had more time, or patience to wait until I was back, I could have fixed
things. But there were a few nitpicks here and there that made me think of switching back to
Workstation and being done with the Silverblue experiment before, and maybe this was the sign
it had to happen?
I re-installed Silverblue and VLC, just in case during the flight I wanted to watch some content I had in external drives, and then had quite a few hours to ponder on making the switch. Already long story short, I ended up going back to Workstation after getting back. Right after the first update ran I had a hint of regret, as instead of being one quick reboot, it had to run some scripts and took longer. But on the other hand, I could just pull more dependencies to install the MullvadVPN client, and now I don't need containers to run or compile certain software.
And I get it! I am polluting my system more and maybe in 6 months I will regret the mess this
installation turns into.
I am still preferring Flatpaks for a lot of software, which maybe helps with that. Time will
tell!
What's done is done. I am now back "home" and my laptop is in a clean state, although by
chance I had backed up a bunch of things in the external drives so timing, in a way, was
good.
There's a lot of little files that are gone, but being honest, a lot of that is stuff I didn't
even look at, things I downloaded and forgot about, scans for old documents that I don't need
anymore... yeah eventually I might realized something useful is gone, but I don't think it is
gonna be anything critical.
And isn't this part of life? some things are just gone. The idea that everything can be preserved forever, even in the digital age, is a bit naive. Sometimes it's ok for things to go away. Just like in the real world...just like it happens to everything else..
And that explains why I was gone for so long, I guess :)
As I said before, I think posting is good for me, makes me focus and practice writing etc. So
I really try to get a post out more often than not. But this time I was forced to wait until I
had the time to setup my laptop from scratch.