Update on my previous rant -

Mac restart after upgrade got stuck due to a fucking corrupted kext file, had to switch between recovery and safe/verbose mode to isolate that bastard, move him out of the folder and then do a clean restart.. Then, after 7 hours, it said 15 minutes remaining to complete installation...

Finally, it came up fine, doing healthy :)

Dear Mac, You, Sir, gave me a scare during a restart and are becoming like Windows (note: bsod) :(

Fuck... This is not how I wanted my Saturday to go..

My Mac restart after update took more than an hour (check my previous rant), went into not responding mode, then got aborted, ultimately ending up with a corrupted disc. Now, not booting up at all...

Into recovery mode now and trying all other options..

Hope my time machine did a good job, else this is gonna be a heartbreaking day !!!

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?