What to Do When The System Stops Ticking

There are times when systems just breaks, possibly because of a buggy package installed or you mistakenly deleted or modified something critical.
The problem is what to do then?
Well, it is true we can try the golden 3R rule anyway

reboot
reinstall
"rebuy"

reboot is comparably cheap to execute
but what if you can actually fix it easily without going to reinstall or a new machine?
just because you are not aware you can to reinstall all the time would be tedious!
In this article, I would like to show some common things you can try when system refuses to work
even after several reboots

system folder is almost anything outside of your home folder /home/user/

When the system folder is somehow messed up that the system just breaks,
you can try to use timeshift to restore your system folder to a previous state.
If you are already in your Cinnamon desktop,
you can just try to open Timeshift and trigger restore, simple.
But there are more nasty situation like you can't even get into the desktop environment!

desktop environment is what we call Cinnamon, or Gnome, or similar, being basically just a set of packages that gives you a GUI experiment.

Let's say it boots, but you are stuck in the middle way, without the ability to enter your desktop environment.
Now you can try to enter the tty console and execute command line timeshift there.
About how to enter the tty console, try Ctrl+Alt+F1 up to Ctrl+Alt+F12,
if the display shows some text mentioning login:
you are in the tty,
then just use your username and password to login
you can now use the command timeshift to restore your system
for usage, type timeshift --help then press Enter to read the help message
you might want to restore your system to the latest working snapshot
so try them one by one.
there is also a GUI way if you don't want to touch tty or the system would not boot at all
just boot into your live system with the usb stick
then start the GUI timeshift there, if it is not preinstalled, install it.
you can install timeshift with sudo apt install timeshift or search for it in Gnome Software Center
Calm down, the GUI timeshift in the live system would be intelligent enough to play with your computer hard disk

Cool, now you can be brave to explore the Linux Mint system since timeshift can back you up!
In the next article, I would like to talk about the funny explorations you can play with.
Only stuff I tried will be covered, so it is absolutely incomplete!
Also, though using the word "play", I don't really mean games, but some new stuff in Linux that is hardly experienced using Windows normally.