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’
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.
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.
@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.
This was pre-linux for me but something you can still do in most distros so I think it’s a valid story.
In 1999 I was using Napster on computer running MS-DOS. I was 12 years old and an aspiring open media enthusiast/stupid script kiddie. I was using the file explorer interface in Napster and accidentally gave access to my entire C drive. I also had opened ports to share certain media and to fuck with my friends using daemon tools (back then you could do stupid stuff like control a friend’s desktop with certain versions of daemon tools). Immediately I started receiving packages called things like “sleep.tight.tiny.mite” and I knew I was fucked so I clicked in the Napster interface and clicked “delete” and deleted my entire active drive.
I panicked and installed the only operating system we had which was a random copy of Red Hat. When my dad came home I pretended like it had always had Linux on it. I do think he was more impressed than mad.
I was trying to extract some files from a a Linux image of one of those ARM boards. It was packed into the cpio format, and I had never used the format before. Of course I was trying to extract to a root owned directory and I sudo’ed it. I effed up the command and overwrote all my system directories (/bin, /usr, /lib, etc…). Thankfully I had backed up my system recently and was able to get it working again.
USB block devices containing mountable filesystems (on Desktop systems) can generally have those filesystems mounted and files written to them by regular users; But the block device itself stays only root writeable.
Makes it so when you install packages with pip, it will only work if it’s using a virtual environment. This keeps any installed packages separate from ones your system uses.
If you want to learn about python virtual environments, check this out.
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