The trials of Cuddles and her poll over in support section have given me a mind to ask this here: how much guts does it take to run Linux really?

Beginning meaningless whine: I am well aware of my "chickeness" . When it comes to keeping my main box running, hardware and software-wise I err on the side of cautiousness. That seems reasonable. I am expert in hardware, can troubleshoot, swap out whatever. Keep at least two boxes around of a similar generation that I can swap out components with very little downtime. And while not an MCSE but earned a living for number of years in IT and am quite competent enough with windows that I can fix what needs to be fixed (often by hours of searching the knowledge base over you-know-where) to keep it up and running. And I got into doing disk images and always back up and can reimage to ultimately fall back on.

When I embarked on my linux journey I started with the knoppix live CD that cannot screw up anything. Then dug out an old junky hard drive and threw it in my my main box so I could play with knoppix harddrive-installed more comfortable then on the edge of the bed on my #2 spare machine . Screwed up knoppix a couple of times with ALSA and just did the el-wipo and reinstall.

Got real cocky and dedicated a new big harddrive for linuxes. And then I got comfy. I had my eyecandy and my docs and hard-won installed goodies. And I got scared. I needed just "one more" thing to make my linux life complete. Temp monitoring. I then spent a week or two in hell. Never screwing up knoppix enough for a reinstall over it alone but ultimately failing at getting the sensors installed and running. I switched to kanotix where Kano had a script for installing the kernel source, I got lm sensors installed with no problem except for having to install bison first. And now I am comfy....again.

Now here I sit after having upgraded KDE, got past two bugs in that upgrade and now I am scared witless. I have held back on some upgrades because they contain "aRTs" or alsa things and I don't want to break ALSA and my sound or worse, my system. I have all the sound I want, I actually have alsa playing nice (ok, uneasy truce) with arts, I have mplayer really installed (not just as local user contained thing, I really went and did it last night, yay me :P ) I got mozilla plugins, I got midi, I got temp monitoring. I got heaps of eye candy. And a great big info/fixes doc folder. But here I sit...frozen practically in time in linux terms. I am running kanotix bughunter 4 and therefore not contributing to the community because bughunter 5 is out but I sit back with the earlier release. Because it is working. Until I try to upgrade something I shouldn't.

I could probably get over this phobia if I could find something along the lines of a disk imager for linux (that I could figure out how to use). I have always been happy with NTI backup for windows partition imaging although very unhappy with how long it takes to restore a couple of gigs of windows and entourage

It takes a lot for someone as experienced as me to screw up windows bad enough that I have to do a restore. Actually, every restore was the result of something third party, spyware that wouldn't budge, windows update, etc.

But with linux it seem all it takes is one wee little update, one little apt-get install blah blah and POOF you are screwed, your stability (yeah, I know silly when you consider almost all of us are running "unstable"). Worse there are the occasional things that can damage the hardware or firmware, like the old mandrake problem with certain CD drives and lm-sensors & Thinkpads, etc.

So how do you get past the fear? Is Linux only for the fearless? I mean, if I am going to become a "static" linux user why am I running unstable Debian and why is my main distro a "bughunter". If I am not going to venture forth and try things and report bugs and work on fixes, shouldn't I just go out and buy Suse? Or even Lindows and CNR?

end whine with a promise I will never post something this long and rambling again so please don't kick me out, I like it here