i tried turning it off and back on again.

A few months ago, the hardware in my iMac shit the bed one final time. Rather than replace it (Apple hardware is not that great, and certainly not designed to last), I decided to convert this epic Xidax gaming rig I have into my primary production machine.

It worked like a dream for a long time, and Windows 10 began to feel like a pretty decent OS, even if I missed some Mac OS UI features (hitting space to preview files, and easy keyboard screen shots were the two I missed the most.)

But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386. So I used every bit of computer learning and troubleshooting I’ve picked up in thirty-five years of computer use, and I turned it off and back on again.

It wouldn’t start up.

So I booted from the DVD, and told it to repair the problem. That didn’t work.

So I attempted to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work.

So I formatted the drive that C: lived on, and tried to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work, and I lost a ton of media by mistake as a bonus (I have it backed up on a Seagate drive, but it’s still a pain in the ass to lose it).

I went to the Internet, and I downloaded a few Linux utility distros to check the hardware integrity on the machine. I booted from those CDs, ran their tools, and confirmed that everything was working correctly.

At this point, my lungs were aching for air.

I got super frustrated, because all the diagnostics I ran appeared to work, and every test told me that there wasn’t anything wrong. It just turns out that Windows won’t install, and it gives me the super helpful advice to check the install logs that I can’t read because when I boot from the Windows DVD, it won’t let me write to any of the mounted file systems.

So I’m moving my opinion dial from “Windows isn’t that bad” back to “Windows is awful garbage that is an affront to all good people in the world.”

Also, one kid seems to really love the Speedo Guy.

Spinning the dial was satisfying, but it didn’t give me a working OS that I could use to get my work done, so I grabbed the latest release of Debian Linux, and booted from the resulting live DVD. It felt familiar, and unlike my Windows nightmare, it Just Worked(tm). For longtime *nix users, especially the subset of us who started using Red Hat or Debian or Mandrake or whatever back in the late 90s, this reality — that Linux worked effortlessly and without any configuration hassles — will likely prove to be quite pleasing.

I wondered if there was a hardware problem that I hadn’t uncovered, maybe a failing HDD or something, and I decided that the best way to test it would be to attempt a Debian install.

About seventeen minutes later, I booted my machine from GRUB, and like a magical leprechaun, Debian just worked. I had to install a couple of drivers to get the most out of the graphics card, to get Flash and Java to go, and to update Chromium, but that was it.

I’m still annoyed with Windows and its lack of useful error messages, and I am confident that I’m not getting the most computing/processing/graphics/awesome power out of this epic machine, but I have an OS that is solid and stable, that is making it possible for me to do my work, browse the Internet, and read and send Email. There are some idiosyncrasies that I’m not crazy about, and there are a few mild frustrations (I can’t easily watch Netflix or Hulu because of stupid DRM issues, and some websites like Twitter are painfully slow), but I’m definitely turning my dial toward “Linux is awesome.”

83 thoughts on “i tried turning it off and back on again.”

  2. Depending on your mobo and its chipset, you could run OS X on it. Apple kind of strictly forbids this, but many folks are happily running Hackintoshes.

  3. Don’t get mad, Wil, but I think you should have bought another iMac. I used to build PCs but after getting my first Mac, I never went back. Apple stands behind their products. Right before the cruise one of my evil cats knocked over my beautiful two-month-old iMac and cracked the enclosure. Because it is so thin, they had to replace the entire screen. I dropped it off before flying down to San Diego and they actually had it fixed while I was still at SFO waiting to board my flight. Cost to me: $99 because I had the AppleCare+. My last iMac lasted about 11 years before finally giving up the ghost. I’m not sure what you mean about the hardware not that great and would love to hear more! Anyway, I have become an Apple partisan just because of my own personal experiences and others may have completely different views.

    Just my own two cents. Have a wonderful rest of the weekend!

    Laurie

    1. I just lost my ’08 iMac to the classic “apple wants you to buy something new so we will not let you update this anymore” marketing ploy. I went and happily put down 2k on a new middle of the line imac, because like you i love my mac and always brag about how ive had it for a decade without it ever crashing once, but… it was garbage. I couldn’t run my own brand new expensive computer the way I wanted to. I was so sad at how it ran, and how things didn’t Just Work™. I took it back and replaced it with a PC, and I’m now stuck in a world of windows garbage. It’s awful. My internet connection is slow, load times suck, and I’m still out 2 grand. I gotta say, I’m with Wil on this one. I’ll probably run into Linux’s arms and never let go. Mac has lost interest in making computers (they now only manufacture shitty phones) and have given up on being worth the money you put into it. It’s sad. I love my old iMac, and wish I could just move everything I love about it into a new shell, but it just doesn’t work that way. 🙁

      1. Debian works without problems on iMacs. Try the Mate Desktop and enjoy your beloved computer.

    2. Don’t get mad, Wil, but I think you should have bought another iMac.

      But he didn’t buy a Windows computer. He already had one for gaming and broadened its scope. Which certainly in the short term makes a lot more sense then running out and spending a lot of money. 😉

  4. Absolutely linux is awesome, but I’m still puzzled why Windows stopped working well. It doesn’t sound like an OS thing or your googling would have uncovered others with the same problem. I wonder if you installed something (or something got installed behind your back) that was causing the problem.

    1. I’ve had WIndows XP, 7 and 10 kill themselves after installing updates.

      XP and 7 semi-randomly thought some partition was a different drive letter than before, so they tried to “fix” it automatically and failed. With any luck Windows 10 has switched to uuid… I’ve had something similar happen in Linux once, but that was entirely my own fault (a typo in /etc/fstab) and I could even fix it on my computer without needing any special tools.[1]

      Windows 10 killed itself for some BIOS/UEFI-related reason.

      That being said, reinstalling has always worked for me, even if Windows has some incredibly annoying habits, including:

      No GPT on BIOS.
      Needs to be the first partition.
      Can’t coexist with older Windows MBR on another drive or some such.

      tl;dr Unplug all your drives (@#$# Windows), make sure it can go on the first partition (#$#$% Windows), and worst of all, it won’t give you anything even remotely resembling useful error message about these things. Something like that could be why reinstallation was seemingly impossible.

      [1] Grub was able to boot into a mini recovery console. Windows has a much harder to use, less powerful equivalent recovery console that requires a special boot disk to use.

  5. I’ve bought my last few systems (all Linux, combination of servers, desktops, and laptops) from System76 (https://system76.com/) in Boulder. The ability to configure RAM, GPU, CPU, and storage blow the doors of anything you can get from Apple, Dell, etc. The support has always been friendly and timely – can’t say enough good things about them as a company and their systems.

  6. I bought a super cheap $200 laptop It came with windows 8.1, and it turned into a (temporary) brick every time I ran updates. Upgraded to windows 10 and I lost the Start menu, and was “lucky” enough to be one with an early kernel that couldn’t be fixed according to Microsoft.

    I installed Ubuntu, and it’s worked flawlessly ever since. There was a small learning curve but overall I love it.

  7. Ugh, what a pain. I’m a little surprised by your comment about Apple hardware not lasting a long time. I’ve got a 2009 iMac and a 2011 iMac that are both still running strong. I popped an SSD in the 2011 iMac and it feels like a new computer.

    Having said that though, I’m also an old Linux guy who remembers installing Slackware off of floppies, so I can certainly appreciate that feeling you get when something just works. I just don’t get why Windows can’t get it right after all these decades. I mean Win 10 is acceptable, but when it shits the bed… just wow.

    The video DRM stuff is a huge pain though.

    1. I just did a life extension on a 2011 MacBook Pro: upgraded to Sierra (my program for ripping DRM from iBooks doesn’t currently work with HS) and installed a 1 TB SSD: amazing what a difference that SSD made. I run VMs of Win 7 & 10 and Linux on it when I need them. If it ever dies, I’ll dig up a 2012 MBP: the last year that was made with components screwed in, and I’ll move the SSD to it.

      My 2011 iMac appeared to have died a horrible video card death, obligingly someone smashed in the window of my wife’s car and stole it before I could get a final diagnosis. Insurance paid for most of a 2015 iMac with a 5K display which I cannot sufficiently describe the sweetness of.

    2. This is what I was thinking too – in my experience (barring a few outliers with specific machines), Apple hardware tends to last WAY longer (which is why it tends to maintain its resale value so well). If I get 4-5 years out of a Windows laptop, I consider that a huge win (example: my 3 year old Dell XPS13 has a bulging battery right now, so I’m trying to decide if I want to extend its life by buying a replacement, or get something new) . But that would be a short lifespan for a Mac laptop IMO.

    3. Check Louis Rossman’s channel on youtube, he repairs Apple hardware and analyzes them in depth. Apple hardware is subjectively inferior to any other manufacturer of the same price / league / tier.

  9. I’ve moved to Linux from Windows and the experience still feels like I’m a beta tester, perpetually.

    I am assuming you chose Chromium very specifically as opposed to google-chrome-stable https://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/google_chrome?dist=stable . Chrome does work on Hulu and Netflix out of the box. I haven’t tested FireFox new browser with either though supposedly it works with Hulu without modification.

    In the above choice is true, I’m under the impression that from version 63 on of Chromium, you can install the WideVince plug-in for Chromium ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/chromium.html ) in order to watch Netflix.

    On an unrelated note…About a year and change ago, I stopped drinking. (I think it was about 6 months after your one year recap.) It’s been a net positive on many fronts. Interestingly, the hardest part was not going away from drinking but going toward…nothing.

    I’ve ended playing Factorio because it runs well on Linux. Other than that, I’ve greatly reduced my computer gaming though not as much as alcohol. Good luck with the computer.

  10. Welcome to Linux.

    BTW It might be the really, REALLY awful patches for Meltdown and Spectre that caused your slowdown.

    1. I agree with this. My normally rock stable self-built desktop went through this. I was able to cross-reference the failing update to the meltdown/spectre updates. After nuking my Windows 10 installation and re-installing they worked okay the next time.

    1. Weird, I’ve tried a bunch of flavors but I just keep coming back to Debian, yet I’d never call it old or dusty.

  12. Windows 10 does not appeal to me; I’m still on Windows 7 on a 6-year-old laptop! I’m not sure what I’ll do next. Anyway, on Win7, shift and prt sc pushed together will take a screenshot.

  13. The more things change… I first started reading your blog back when WWDN was a box you managed yourself and you were blogging about trying Linux. Some of my favorites, to this day.

    I’ve also been using Ubuntu for 10 years. I built a new machine when Windows 7 came out, and it kept crashing. I couldn’t figure it out for a few months, ended up switching to Linux. Linux worked without crashing for several more months. One day, it let me know that the boot drive (a cheap SSD) was disconnected. Turns out the drive was bad, and randomly lost connection to the BIOS. Windows dealt with that by crashing immediately, while Linux just kept running. I replaced the SSD, but never went back to Windows.

  14. your windows issue may have been specre/meltdown patch related. The symtoms fit with the bitched/half ass first set of microcode updates from Intel.

  16. What, you have a Xidax PC too?! I absolutely love mine. A great company too. Used Red Hat for a long time but just recently switched to windows. So far so good. Hope to avoid the issue you encountered!

  17. Windows puts the POS in OS.

    My refurbished Windows 7 laptop has been running slower lately and just the other day I thought “Maybe I should go back to Linux?” I was thinking Ubuntu, since that’s what I used for years, but maybe I’ll do some investigating and look at different distros.

    And now that I think about it, I first started using Linux…oh geez, 15 some years ago?…because you’d blogged about it and I was tired of Windows and not really an Apple user, so I decided to give it a try. The cycle has come back around!

    1. I’ve been using Ubuntu forever now, but I’ve heard good things about Mint if you want to stay somewhat in the familiar realm of apt. Many of the repositories work for both etc. OTOH since Ubuntu is going back to GNOME I’ve just stuck with it. I wasn’t a huge fan of Unity.

        1. I used to run Mint but have been running Ubuntu for the past couple years. FWIW, if you want something that looks like Windows (and had default layouts to mimic MacOS, Unity and others), I would try Ubuntu MATE. It is quit polished, has a great Welcome app for newbies and has a software boutique app that explains (and will install) the most popular applications.

          1. I personally prefer mint to Ubuntu and I certainly prefer it to windows which is just frustrating.

  18. Seems like the DVD itself is corrupted :/ I understand why people get frustrated with Windows OSs (they should come with a warning: you will get frustrated, things will break for no apparent reason and you’re a prime target for malware if you’re not very careful) but honestly I’ve been using them for more than 20 years on homemade PCs and laptops now because they’re affordable (Apple isn’t for me), there are tons of great free software working on it and they led me to learn about hardware and software because I wanted to be an independent user. I do try and use Ubuntu every few years as they’ve made great steps towards a friendly UI but am still unhappy with it. I usually have it as a backup OS on every machine with Windows as the primary OS. If it fails you know there’s a good change your hardware is failing.

    Anyway, very glad you’ve found a solution and reconnected with something familiar.

    1. Maybe try using some other distro than Ubuntu if you’re not happy with the interface. Mint has a very intuitive interface for windows users if you use their flagship cinnamon desktop environment

    2. It’s doubtful that the DVD is corrupted. A more likely scenario is that Wil’s Win 10 DVD was created during the free upgrade period. DVDs created during that time had a glaring fault in that they lacked the necessary permissions to overwrite an existing Win 10 installation. The work around is to burn a copy of GParted, boot to it, and then reformat the entire drive as NTFS. Now insert the Win 10 DVD and it will happily install.

      FWIW, Wil, I think that you would have a better user experience if you eschewed straight Debian in favour of a top Debian based distro IE ones that give you easy access to the codecs, drivers and other binary blobs necessary for modern hardware and web applications like MX Linux or Mint.

  19. The joy of proprietary boards I’m afraid to say. Nix will work on about anything mac and Windows, depending on manufacturer is locked to what shipped with product.

  21. As long as your windows 10 key is legal, and you haven’t changed the mobo, you should just be able to install fresh windows 10, even from the free upgrade era. Just download win 10 boot to a USB drive, and install. When it asks for key, skip, it will auto connect once you hit the internet.

  22. I’ve had Chrome on my (GalliumOS) laptop for the last couple of years just for Netflix, though all I’ve ever done with it is to add stuff to my queue…

    I made the mistake last year of “upgrading” my wife’s laptop & our shared desktop from Win7 to 10. I only ever use the desktop for copying Audible books onto my mp3 player (switched to Downpour, but I’ve still got a large collection on Audible, and yes admitting that makes me feel dirty), and every time I end up screaming at it.

  23. Sounds like you might have hit the same buggy update for Windows that my daughter’s box did. Their update quality has been going down in the last few years. There was a race condition in an update released in the last couple of months that screwed up some boxes that manifested several ways. My daughter’s was one of them. I had to uninstall the update to get the box back in a good state (after which it was fine).

  24. Writing you from my Ubuntu box, using XFCE as the UI. (XFCE is very seriously configurable, unlike GNOME.) It’s nice to see you rejoining the collective, and I remember giving you coming to an SGVLUG meeting once or twice. On the gaming side, “Unknown Horizons” is nice.

  25. “Apple hardware is not that great, and certainly not designed to last.”
    I do not agree with you.

    I started to work in IT-Tech about 33 years ago. Jobwise thousands of Windows based computers have gone through my hands, because i did IT -Tech for companies who employ thousands of people. I know about the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of these PCs from first hand experience! I still have to work with Windows based PCs on a daily basis.

    Till mid 2004 i was privately a PC user and about every 2-3 years i needed a new PC.
    Because of Garageband and Logic (writing and recording my own songs is one of my hobbies) i switched to Apple in mid 2004. For gaming i still use a native Windows bootcamp partition, that i run on an external drive nowadays.

    In our family we own an white 24″ iMac from 2006 and an MacMini from 2009, that i moved both over to my parents house (who are 80 years of age by the way), so that they can surf the net, do their emails and use Skype with relatives. A 27″ iMac i7 from 2013 and a brand new 27″ iMac i7 build early 2018 that are used by my wife and me. Every one of these Macs runs without any problems.

    All the Mac owners i know personally run at least one Mac that is more than 4-5 years old, but none of the people in know who run a Windows based PC, is still running a PC of the same age.

  26. I wish I could say something celver but all I actually can say is: I am ever so grateful for my husband who studied computer science. So, if I run into problems which can’t be solved by pulling the plug, all I have to do is shout “Sweeeeetheart! Something’s wrong!” And – whoooosh – magic happens.

  27. Hey Wil, you don’t needa mac. You are smart enough to deal with linux. You seem the type who is capable of figuring out things. (No offense to mac users)

    Btw whats up with the podcast? At least a mixtape? Pretty please!

  28. My computer is eight pancakes.

    If I flip them in the right sequence I can spell “tude.”

    I’m thinking of upgrading to sixteen, but I’ll need a new spatula.

  29. “Hello I T. Have you tried turning it off and back on again”

    “Oh, I see the problem. This isn’t a computer, it’s a briefcase”

    Love that show

  30. How’s the drumming going? Vent some anger over the puter issues. Check out Avery drummer Molek on youtube He has come on a bit over the last few years.

  31. Ah the joys of using Microsoft products.
    They either work as advertised (well … sort of) or you’re in deep doo-doo as the things start throwing error messages that no one seems to understand.

    I’m thinking that these systems only work if you provide regular sacrifices on the altar of a demon called B-ill-Gates.
    Of course no one knows what the required sacrifices are, so …

    As such I’m guessing that the presence of Apple hardware had made the demons of Redmond angry.

  32. I really expected this post to end with, “And so, I went to the Apple Store and bought a new computer, happily ever after, the end.” Lol. My last MacBook Pro that I got in 2010 is still working and my kids use it all the time. Their stuff seems to last for my family!

  36. Not sure if this will help, but Woody Leonhard, who’s an expert on all this related to MS, has a good website called AskWoody who could help you with future Win10 problems. Just about all of the Windows 7,8, 8.1 and 10 problems can be traced to the incompetence of MS forcing all kinds of buggy updates that causes most MS computers to crash. I use him all the time for my Win7 computer

  38. It definitely sounds like your Windows installer DVD shit the bed. I’ve never encountered anything like what you ran into, nor heard about anybody encountering anything like it. Very weird. If you want to try to get Windows back (if there’s any particular reason to have it, otherwise just stick with Debian), you can download a fresh installer ISO here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows10 – and either burn it to disc or create a bootable USB installer.

    And if you do go back to Windows – regarding your screenshot issue – I recommend GreenShot (http://getgreenshot.org/) – it’s a great free open source screenshot app for Windows.

  40. You should try the modern Solus OS Linux distribution. Unlike Debian, which is as old as a dinosaur, and suited more as a server OS with optimizations meant for servers, Solus OS is focused purely on the Linux desktop. As a result, Solus ships with more desktop-oriented software with rolling release updates, a user-friendly software center with access to third party software, more aggressive compiler optimizations for higher performance (incl. profile-guided optimizations, which makes Firefox 30% faster), better package defaults (upstream configurations), more features by default (MPV with Vapoursynth, Wine with Gallium Nine), and a lot of effort has gone into Ikey’s Linux Steam Integration efforts to ship a better Steam gaming experience.

    https://solus-project.com/

  41. It is so sad what has happened to Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs died in late 2011, Apple has abandoned their dedication to Just Works™. Not only do they focus primarily on gadgets (phones and watches and speaker systems of all things) instead of computers now, but the crap they release now is always f’d up in some way. The first version always has some kind of flaw that needs to be patched. I remember when Apple would actually delay the release of something until it worked perfectly.

    All of the computers that everyone is saying have lasted forever are pre-2011.

  42. As a corollary to this, Wil — I was wondering how your experience was in going from Windows to Linux and finding the applications that you need. Is there anything that you’re stuck on that you wish you had a Linux version/alternative for?

  45. “Apple hardware is not that great, and certainly not designed to last”

    Tell that to my 2011 Mac mini that is still working perfectly and is still getting the latest software updates!!

    There are tons of articles online about how Apple hardware lasts longer than other systems. Like how people keep holding on to their old ipads because they keep on going! I have an iPad 3 from 2012 that is still going strong.
    And articles about how refurbished iphones are getting more popular than new android phones!
    And Apple hardware is known for its high resale value because of the high hardware quality!!

    Perhaps Wil stepped into a parallel universe somehow where Apple makes mediocre hardware???

    1. This was true, until Steve Jobs died. My ’08 iMac was/is a trooper (I can’t really use it anymore), but now that Jobs is gone, they don’t care much for longevity.

  46. Welcome to the club! FWIW, Firefox supports the Widevine plugin (the same that Chrome uses for DRM), so Netflix works on it as well.

    Also, I’m curious, what led you to Debian?

    1. Also, I’m curious, what led you to Debian?

      Back in the 90s, I tried nearly every distro. I settled on Debian because I like the package manager, and because the install is so dead simple. I like the ability to choose how stable I need (want) my desktop to be, and how robust the software is.

  47. I feel you on the liking of Linux. I ran it for a while on a personal laptop of mine, but it kept giving me issues because that laptop also doubles as a tablet and wouldn’t stay suspended when the lid was closed, so I put Windows back on it. If I can ever figure a fix for that issue, I’m switching back right away.

  50. Sorry to hear your Mac up and died on you, but at least you got something new you are excited to use. Your latest podcast sounded great being recorded on the new hardware and OS. It made my day when I saw a new Radio Free Burrito in my podcast app. Thanks!

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