I was around 18 when I started, so doing nonsensical things was my area of expertise at the time. That helps a bit with the feeling of time waste.
Still, it was not a complete waste, because now I can fix any such problems in minutes, and I always carry an archiso drive on me (which I used maybe once in the past 5 years to fix somebody else’s PC which wasn’t even running Arch).
I will say, without exaggerating, recovering from Windows boot issues has caused me WAY more issues over the years. It doesn’t tell you what’s actually wrong, you don’t get much in terms of tools, and so it’s much harder to fix unless you want to completely reinstall Windows (which apparently is a good idea to do regularly too…).
I was around 18 when I started, so doing nonsensical things was my area of expertise at the time. That helps a bit with the feeling of time waste.
Still, it was not a complete waste, because now I can fix any such problems in minutes, and I always carry an archiso drive on me (which I used maybe once in the past 5 years to fix somebody else’s PC which wasn’t even running Arch).
I will say, without exaggerating, recovering from Windows boot issues has caused me WAY more issues over the years. It doesn’t tell you what’s actually wrong, you don’t get much in terms of tools, and so it’s much harder to fix unless you want to completely reinstall Windows (which apparently is a good idea to do regularly too…).