Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Tim Watts Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: How do home users of linux protect themselves against ill-advised changes? Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:28:08 +0000 Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: <6vgrnb-rs8.ln1@squidward.dionic.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net t5FX9yQaihhd5THBpcVslQjJhGNr/P6iCOlqDJcwaV5CO3CqPb X-Orig-Path: squidward.dionic.net!not-for-mail Cancel-Lock: sha1:zUGZoO5EW34Ka7zGHRtTN5y14SU= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.3.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:13321 On 06/01/15 18:11, Marc Haber wrote: > Tim Watts wrote: >> On 05/01/15 22:25, Marc Haber wrote: >>> But, if it's your job, you should have spare hardware or VMs available >>> so that you do not need to risk your primary working tool. >> >> That's valid - but there's nothing like testing a distro by real world >> daily use for a while :) > > You're free to use the VM or the spare hardware, as long as you have > the possibility to just return to the production machine in a whim. "I > had to re-install my main laptop" is not a valid excuse for a half-day > production downtime if things go bad. Which, by way of circular argument brings us back to the beginning - someone said "have 2 OS partitions" and I agreed. Then we had a huge debate :) > >> Sure - using a VM is a good way to narrow the choices down by excluding >> the non starters - but for one it does not expose the OS to testing on >> real hardware (like pulling USB devices in and out, graphics, >> suspend/resume and many other real world tests. > > Spare Hardware. One Does Not Use an untested system on the hardware > that one is paid for to use to fix things. Ideally. But if one does not have the funds for a second modern laptop... And once installed onto the 2nd partition, you have to be pretty careless to damage the first OS.