What would happen if you forgot your login password, or even your root password? I was thinking about this today because Manjaro was displaying another one of those many small hiccups that seem to be typical with most linux distros. It gave me the logon screen when I told it not to do that. I had to enter a password, or it wasn't going to let me in. I remember telling it to never do this when I first installed the OS. It was something that I was glad to have.
I never set up any logon password, because I want the computer to just go straight into the desktop when powered on. I'm the only one that has access to this computer, and I'm just sort of learning linux on it for awhile. There's nothing stored on it that is of any consequence, I just save it all on a big flash drive that wouldn't be affected by some kind of bad problem with the OS.
But I would like to think that I won't have to do that forever. That once I'm "good at" linux, I'll be able to save anything and everything on the main drive (if I so desire) and not have to worry about something like being locked out of the computer. Luckily, it accepted the root user password for the login that I never set up. I'm guessing that you could have two separate passwords if you wanted to? One for root, one for logon. So it feels to me like I got pretty lucky today, that the OS was nice enough to hiccup in a way that let the root password be the logon password. Because I never had anything to do with that.
Would I be able to recover my distro if it was asking for a password that I didn't know?
