Fedora Workstation Brainstorming A Possible GUI-Based Linux Recovery Environment

[Vorpal]

This sounds really neat. I'm not in the target audience myself (I don't use Fedora, and I'm more comfortable with a terminal than a GUI these days).

One thing that will be needed is to survey what sort of issues are common for the intented target audience to experience. And like the image in the article shows, it is going to be a moving target, as the software stack evolves. So constant maintenance and development will be needed.

The only booting issues I tend to run into myself these days are occasionally on new installs with improper grub config, fstab, mdraid, crypttab or similar. And I have always been doing something not supported by the official installer of the distro in question when it happened. Or installing a "manual" distro like Gentoo or Arch.

I don't remember the last time I had to debug booting issues with a Linux install that wasn't a brand new one. That definitely happened back in the early days though (2004 or so for me).

Finally, I hope they can make something that is modular so it isn't too Fedora specific. Would be nice if other distros can adapt it (with some modules replaced as needed of course).

[jorgepl]

I don't want ti break the hype, but PopOS already has something like this...

[birdie]

This GUI-based recovery environment would offer a user-friendly boot repair tool and other UI-based tools for helping recover from bad system state.

This sounds almost impossible to implement considering that we have a metric ton of things which can break in the boot process and which vary from system to system.

Resetting the system to the known good state and `mv /home/user /home/user.bak; mkdir /home/user; chown user:user /home/user; chmod 700 /home/user` is doable.

Everything else? Most likely wishful thinking.

Even in Windows where Microsoft pushes the same environment on everyone, the restore boot tool more often doesn't work than it does.

[Vorpal]

This sounds almost impossible to implement considering that we have a metric ton of things which can break in the boot process and which vary from system to system.

Resetting the system to the known good state and `mv /home/user /home/user.bak; mkdir /home/user; chown user:user /home/user; chmod 700 /home/user` is doable.

Everything else? Most likely wishful thinking.

Even in Windows where Microsoft pushes the same environment on everyone, the restore boot tool more often doesn't work than it does.

I can think of a few other useful things that could be done:

• SMART checks for storage
• File system checking
• Integrity checking installed packages (all files present with correct checksums?)
• Checking EFI/bootloader settings.
• A memcheck option should also be bundled but probably needs to be invoked really early on, and last I looked the classic memcheck86 didn't work on UEFI. It also takes a lot of time to run.
• Restoring to a previous state of /etc and /var (a mechanism to back those up regularly need to be in place first, such as btrfs snapshots, or git commits of /etc using etckeeper)

The first four should probably be combined into a generic button to not confuse inexperienced users too much. And SMART tests should in that case be kept to short ones, such as just checking the overall health flag. I remember some HDD I had where the "extended" smart test was about 4 hours.

More difficult ones would be checking fstab etc. But perhaps it could be possible to cover typical installs. The users who most need this GUI are unlikely to have installed for example lvm on dmcrypt on mdraid with a custom kernel. If the system detects an atypical install it could just report that it can't deal with that situation.

[Volta]

I also hope that Linux will once reach Windows 95 quality (first version with safe mode).. but it would only work, if would be same or better than some Live USB session, this should be connected with something like Windows System recovery, where system changes would be recorded and small incremental backups created.. and it would be actually working.

Linux beat this POS in 1991, so wake me up when winblows reaches Linux quality and windows recovery (nice try) actually does something.

[Jbk0]

That could work well with automated btrfs subvolume snapshots.

[marlock]

Ok, sure, linux gui recovery without auxiliary media is not a thing yet...

...but we can use a linux liveboot to install anew, to have a full-fledged working OS, and recovery suite already... so actually all I'd ask for is that this liveboot bundles a bit more in terms of preinstalled recovery software... taking Linux Mint as an example, going into the liveboot is enough to recover from broken bootloaders (with Boot-Repair) and to restore the OS to a previous state (with TimeShift), to browse the internet (with Firefox), run the Linux Mint setup wizzard (in a window while doing anything else in the liveboot), etc

[kylew77]

One time my GNOME desktop was messed up, so I had to install Weston.
Another time my packages were messed up, so I had to use Synaptic Package Manager.
Another time my network was messed up, I had to write weird commands to fix it.

One time when I shutdown Windows 10 it had put my network card into some deep ACPI sleep mode, so when I restarted to Linux my network card was still in sleep mode and wouldn't work. It would be great with some network diagnostics that check if I have an IP address, if it can resolve DNS, if the Ethernet cable is plugged in, if the network card is in some weird ACPI deep sleep mode.

"ip a" will show you if you have an ip address
"ethtool" will show you if you have a connection on the cable.

[uid313]

"ip a" will show you if you have an ip address
"ethtool" will show you if you have a connection on the cable.

Yeah, that is tricky to use, I had to Google on my phone, and then read forum posts and try bunch of different commands with bunch of different options. Tricky!
I wish this GUI tool had something easy to use that did all this for me with the press of a button.

[alem]

If the OS can do a restore on its own, why we need a human intervention?

If the OS is unable do to that, how a non tech person with a nice GUI could be able to know what went wrong and fix it?

At this point, following an online tutorial with CLI commands or clicks, makes no difference.

The only useful way to allow anyone to recover a system, is with previous saved states selectable during the boot (aka transactional system configuration).