this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You'll break things if you do more and more stuff suggested inside this thread without testing it. Maybe executing ldconfig was enough, but if you try more and more stuff you don't know what you did. Linux is very hard to break, especially when you didn't mess around with things like packages and libraries by yourself, there's mostly a way back. But if you're scared use the time and make a backup and a live USB stick with a Linux distro of your choice to rescue the system if something's terribly messed up.
I'm not concerned about Linux breaking, I'm concerned about the laptop itself. My last laptop stopped being able to boot into any OS or even enter the bios after I was repeatedly restarting it one day and my laptop before that has a problem where for some reason the screen gets dark spots if it's turned on more than once a day. I also have another laptop that has a failing GPU and another that for some reason can't read internal hard drives anymore. In the off chance that Linux does have problems, I am already prepared for that but as I said, I'm more concerned about the laptop. We've had it for over 5 years and we really can't afford a new one.