@fl42v I have thousands from my early days, but my only recent-ish one was pretty funny.
On an Arch install that hadn't been updated for a while, in a rush, had an app that needed OpenSSL 3. Instead of updating the whole system, I just updated the openssl package.
Everything broke immediately. Turns out a lot of stuff depends on openssl. Who knew?
To fix, booted to the arch installer, chrooted into my env, and reverted to the previous version of the package — then updated properly.
I’ve had the typical disasters with partition tables and boot loader mixups, but the one I keep coming back to is updating my Nvidia drivers too eagerly. Whether something gets messed up with an external monitor, or the laptop starts resisting switching away from the integrated GPU, or an electron app I use regularly that makes heavy use of 3D acceleration breaks, or I just need to bump the driver version in a reproducible system state record… it’s just bad news.
I really like this project, but may be it’s just a my desktop problem the nitrome games I downloaded like to lag using it. It’s still really cool, though.
Back when I used ubuntu, Unity was stuck with old gnome packages. This meant that the version gnome-terminal packaged with ubuntu (up to at least 18.04) didn’t have text reflow on window size changes.
You could add the upstream sources, upgrade the specific text reflow package only, and then disable the sources.
I forgot to disable the sources, or typed dist-upgrade (this happened multiple times…). Broke the whole desktop/lightdm setup with half upgraded packages, and half removed packages (for preparation to install new versions). Way easier to reinstall the os than to disentangle. Unity was a mess then anyway.
Moral: Actually read the package change summaries when doing updates/removes/installs, and [ y/N ] means actually check what the fuck you think you’re agreeing to.
BtrFS snapshots for idiots
I’ve also run automated snapshots on my btrfs partition, then run out of space doing multi-hop system upgrade on fedora (dnf has a plugin that creates a snapshot every time it kicks in.
You can imagine there were many changes happenning per snapshot, and I effectively could have rolled back 4 major fedora versions… Til I ran out of space.
I couldn’t get a replacement drive in time, and I had an hour to rebuild my laptop before needing to be on a customer site, so sadly I couldn’t preserve my drive for later investigation. My best guess is the high-water-mark was configured incorrectly, and somehow it was able to ‘write’ data past the extents of the filesystem.
Rollback did work for my home partition, but I had to mount it from another OS to get it to work - so no data loss!
By that time I’d already reinstalled the os to the root partition/subvolume however, so I couldn’t determine the exact cause of failure :(
Moral: Snapshots are not backups, and ‘working’ is not ‘tested’
The reality that OpenOffice is dead since a decade aside and you only want to try it for experiment reasons and not for actually using it: What happens instead? Do you get any error messages? Try running it from a shell and see if you get any useful output.
I do a lot of PDF work which requires edits, encryption, etc. Unfortunately the only solution I found that worked for me was a paid one. I use Code Industry’s Master PDF Editor.
I’ve been a user of Master PDF for years now. It’s my go-to for PDF markup in Linux. Their yearly renewal can be kinda wonky, but their customer service has been excellent.
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