It all started with me accidentally knowing about Pop!_OS. Until last week, I was a content Windows user for several years. After all, I only had to run my IntelliJ IDE, a browser and a postgres instance on Windows, so couldn't complain. But once I settle with something, I reach a point when I want to explore if there are any better alternatives - and I looked if I could dual boot linux. That's when it all went downhill!
AT first, I looked at Ubuntu since I used it extensively five years ago. Later, I stumbled on Pop!_OS which seemed to be built on top of Ubuntu with some additional bells and whistles. So I decided to give it a try.
Downloaded the ISO image and the USB Flasher software - Rufus, only then to realize that I did not have a USB stick. It took 30 minutes of digging the electronic garbage at my house to find a old USB stick.
Right then - flashed the ISO image onto the USB stick as a bootable drive, set up the BIOS to load from the stick and started installing the Pop!_OS.
It went well - the OS came prebuilt with Nvidia drivers, so that was a relief. Didnt' have to digg through internet to find drivers for the Graphics card that I have on my machine. The UI was slick and modern. Loved the "Nerd" feeling it gave while using a Linux (all I did was clicked on Install button and followed the wizard, but hey! it's linux!! ;) )
The issue started when I tried to reboot. Instead of asking to to choose between Windows / Pop!_OS, the bootloader directly took me to Pop!_OS. That irked me, as I needed dual boot. I started googling / asked the lords at ChatGPT to show me a way. With the information I collected, I started mangling with the boot records!
For a while, I was able to force the dual boot by pressing Space bar at the right time - but this is not a ideal experience. Then I mangled the boot record a bit more and I finally ended up corrupting the Windows bootloader. Handling boot records wasn't something that JavaScript teaches you! :D
Now I ended with a fresh Pop!_OS that doesn't have any of my project data and a corrupted Windows 11 that has my data but I couldn't boot into. Perfect.
Long story short - I wiped everything and installed Ubuntu as a sole OS. Since I have all my projects backed up in GitHub, it wasn't hard to get it back up. Only issue was that I lost the postgress DB that I was building for the past 2 years. Unfortunately, I did not have a DB schema nor data backed up. Only relief was that I still had the data files committed in git and the source code - so I was able to infer the schema from code and rerun the scripts to build the DB again. And I am refactoring my code to use Sequelize so the schema is also in the code.
Now my dev environment is setup and I am back on Ubuntu.