From a totally technical standpoint, I think it's pretty difficult to achieve some sort of a nice recovery mode. From what I know Windows would boot into a recovery partition (which does not always exist, so it doesn't always work). I don't think such implementation exists yet in the Linux world unfortunately (in some way systemd would need to fallback to a separate fstab or a separate target that instructs the system to mount and switch-root into a separate recovery rootfs).

Or you could try to include networking and other tools into the initramfs, but obviously that would greatly slow down system boot up times.

I am not so sure how practical the separate fstab thing is, I don't even know if that's supported by systemd currently, but I think that's the only way to have recovery mode implemented properly for both command line and graphical situations.

An alternative approach is to have the bootloader count the number of times the system has not booted up properly somehow, and automatically select a different target or kernel. But again obviously I don't think such implementations exist yet.

I tried setting up a screen reader once to test my website and concluded that Linux is just not very usable for people who actually need a screen reader to use their computer

it took a lot of effort and getting through a bunch of very confusing setup to get it working at all, and then getting a voice better than barely-understandable was a whole another challenge

I feel like getting this working well and making the setup easy would require having some single organization work on improving every piece of the system to make it all coherent and easy to set up

this is indeed not a great state of affairs

As someone who has used serial ports frequently for remote diagnosis of systems in various bad states (which would be set up in emergency mode), I wonder if braille devices that can behave like a VT100 terminal are still made

I imagine "nice termcap guis" would still be a pain, but at least the emergency mode tools don't use many of those that I've seen?

It strikes me that the design of PC hardware shares almost as much blame for this

isn't the bigger problem that errors in fstab can brick your installation?

I mean it would be nice that any fstab error opened up the file in the event of failure and highlighted the line entry failure.

A bit late, but "x-systemd.automount" should work here by removing the disk from the global fs unit and creating a separate automount unit for it, which is allowed to fail without blocking things.

It basically postpones mounting until anything accesses the path.

It will however fail depended units needing files on that filesystem.

"because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs." -- has Debian rejected your patch to fix the issue and told you to screw yourself? What a bunch of dumbass!!

Joking aside, It's frustrating for sure, but no one is trying to get one over you or maximize shareholders' return. No one owe you anything for the free work they are doing.