Nokkaelaein wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2025 12:52 pm
Though writing "I have erased all my bootup disks, and will be using another distro. Due to having to shutdown my PC using hard power off -- all the boot drives (SSDs) are corrupted", and then writing the exact same thing five months later... raises some questions on what has actually happened
MX-17 is a little before my time, but I have to guess the default choice of file systems offered in the installer was approximate to ext2/3/4, XFS, JFS, F2FS, btrfs, and FAT32. Of these, only ext2, F2FS, and FAT32 don't offer crash protection through consistency mechanisms such as journaling or copy-on-write. While I've never experimented with F2FS, I can say I tried putting
MX on a FAT32 partition last summer and it was unusable.
Of course, I didn't expect it to work and if you set FAT32 as the file system of choice for the root partition in the installer, it will allow the decision but the install will fail.
To put it simply, you have to be doing something that isn't shown in the brochure to end up having a power cycle corrupt your data on a modern Linux box. Either the reviewer experienced a hardware problem and decided to blame the OS, which is all too common, or he installed his machine with, say, ext2, power cycled the machine, saw the fsck, and concluded "my disk must be corrupt". I could expect losing whatever files you were working on at the time, but corrupting multiple drives as this review leads you to believe? Incredible, in the literal sense.
All this assumes, of course, that an anonymous person on a post-shark website I rarely think of and never visit has been completely honest about his experiences and is leaving multiple copy-and-paste 1-star reviews without engaging in any amount of exaggeration or hyperbole whatsoever. To your point, this story seems unlikely. While I'll stop short of saying it flat-out didn't happen, I'll charitably say I suspect the reviewer believes his statements are factual and accurate, but I've been around too long to ignore the fact that some people have a pathological gift for misunderstanding things.
I'm with Eadwine Rose on this one: we should stop discussing DistroWatch reviews as a general custom, and limit conversations about them to the one or two knee-slappers that are bound to crop up every six months or so.