I have an older PC running as a file server using an Asus mobo raid controller that I've been afraid of updating. It also is the newest PC I have that still has an optical drive. I found some old discs I wanted to recover the data from, but Windows decided it could see the optical drive and assign it a drive letter, was happy with the driver, but did not want to actually read any discs. Fortunately, I too had a Cinnamon Mint USB on my desk, and a very old laptop with an optical drive that had an unbootable Windows 7 install on it. Fired it up and had it on the network and copying files from a DVD-R to my NAS in just a few minutes! Laptop is now running Mint and performs well :)

Another glorious victory in the OS wars.

Worth noting my linux pc has never crashed out of nowhere on its own. Its usually immediately after i change something

I know that story doesn't really go anywhere, but it was a big deal to me!

Don't tell @madthumbs@lemmy.world he has such a hateboner for Linux he runs !linuxsucks@lemmy.world and will think you are lying or paid shill.

Keeping spare boot drives are wonderful. Certainly has come in handy on occasion. I'm surprised how many times I think something is a hardware issue that booting because both W11 and a recovered live boot Windows simply think it doesn't exist and then booting into Linux, it just works.

I remember when I was still using Windows 7 the PC broke (I forget what broke) but I was able to recover all of my files just by simply booting into Ubuntu and mounting the drives. It was my first time ever using Linux and but since then I've been happy with using Linux and keep a USB with cachyos on it just in case.

Running from USB is extremely cool as a feature.