My Fedora Beta Disaster: Lessons from Two Years of Linux Journey

Lakhindar Pal — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:31:33 +0000

I’ve been using Linux for almost two years now, and what a ride it’s been. I started with Linux Mint Cinnamon, dual-booting with Windows. After a month, I realized I didn’t really need Windows anymore, so I wiped it out and went full-time Linux.

That’s when the distro-hopping phase began. I tried Ubuntu, openSUSE, Manjaro, Fedora, and even Arch Linux. Eventually, I found my home in Fedora Workstation. It felt balanced — stable, modern, and polished.

Since I mostly do coding-related work, I never had much dependency on Microsoft Office. LibreOffice was more than enough for occasional document work. Everything I needed just worked.

The Dual-Boot Detour

About three months ago, I had to dual-boot with Windows again because a few software setups on Fedora were giving me a hard time. But that didn’t last long. Once I got things working again, I switched back to Fedora-only.

Then came Omerchy (yep, that hype got me too). I gave it a try, but I wasn’t ready for Hyprland yet, so back to Fedora I went.

The Mistake: Installing Fedora 43 Beta

Last week, I decided to install Fedora 43 Beta. On my only machine.

No dual boot. No VM. Just pure Fedora Beta.

Big mistake.

It started off fine — smooth and fast. But then, last night, I ran:

sudo dnf upgrade

Halfway through the update, my Wi-Fi disconnected. When I tried to run the upgrade again, I got this error:

the operation would result in removing the following protected packages: systemd-udev

I tried:

sudo dnf autoclean

That worked fine, but the upgrade command still failed. So I rebooted.

And that’s where everything fell apart.

The Crash

After reboot, I couldn’t log in. Every time I entered my password, the UI froze.
Switching to a TTY with Ctrl + Alt + F6 worked — I could log in to the terminal, but no GUI.

I searched around and found others facing similar issues. Someone suggested running:

sudo dnf remove --duplicates

But that’s not even recognised as a valid command.

sudo dnf distro-sync

No luck with it also.

Then I stumbled upon a random gist that claimed to fix “duplicate packages” issues.
Several users commented that it worked for them.

So I ran it. Without verifying what it did.

And that completely broke my system.

Now, even basic system commands like sudo, su, ssh, and dnf stopped working.
Running any of them gave me:

error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.3

Even reboot didn’t work. I was locked in a half-dead terminal session.

My USB wasn’t being recognized either, so I couldn’t back up anything.

What I Lost

Thankfully, I had a partial backup from when I switched from Omerchy. But I still lost two major projects:

My college project, a RAG-based chatbot I’d been working on.

An Android app, almost finished but not yet pushed to GitHub.

That one really hurt.

Lessons Learned

Here’s what I learned the hard way:

Never install a beta OS as your daily driver — no matter how stable it looks.
Always verify random commands before running them, especially from gists or forums.
Keep regular backups, not just occasional ones.
If you’re doing serious work, use LTS or stable releases.
When updating, make sure your internet connection is stable (especially with dnf upgrade).

Final Thoughts

Despite everything, I still love Fedora. It’s my favorite Linux distro by far.
But this experience was a reminder that even the best system can break if you’re careless with updates and commands.

I’ll be reinstalling Fedora — the stable version this time — and setting up a proper backup routine before anything else.

If you’re a fellow Linux enthusiast, learn from my mistakes: curiosity is great, but always have a safety net.