What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup?

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using –overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?

acow,

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.

rhys,
@rhys@rhys.wtf avatar

@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.

bigkahuna1986,

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.

lemming741,

I installed python one time

drndramrndra,

The first time I installed Fedora after like a decade I updated to new minor version -> sudo reboot because I was already in the terminal -> reinstalled because it wouldn’t boot anymore

FQQD,
@FQQD@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

I copied a program into the /bin/ folder while in a file browser with sudo permissions and somehow overwrote every file except the one I was moving. It, of course, couldn’t boot, but copying the bins from a live iso made it at least boot able. Reinstalled Linux after that, of course.

DrillingStricken,

Once I succumbed to a proprietary software’s allure, post-usage, I felt like a digital pariah! To rid myself of the taint, I wiped my system clean – reinstall time!

lemmyreader,

Years ago a friend mistakenly typed in killall5 as root on a remote server. Didn’t break things but resulted in extra work and effort.

Dremor,
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar

On OpenSUSE, in Yast bootloader tool, there is a checkbox to to do something like locking the bootloader (it has been a while, I don’t remember the exact thingy). Rebooted and oh, surprise, the bootloader was locked… Which mean Grub didn’t load.

I had to reinstall the whole OS 🤣

paddirn, (edited )

Years ago I was dual-booting with Ubuntu just to try out whatever this Linux thing was that all the nerds were talking about. Liked it and played around with it, but for whatever reason I wanted to go back to just Windows, I needed the space I had partitioned off or something, can’t remember why. So I just uninstalled or deleted the bootloader somehow (maybe I just deleted the Linux partition and expected the space to clear up like normal).

Go to restart the computer… oh shit. Ohshotohshitohshitohshit.

Cwilliams, (edited )

At one point I had the coolest Ventoy USB; CyberRe, LABEL=hakr. But then I got a new computer and apparently the ssd was /dev/nvme0n1 instead of /dev/sda. While I was installing Arch, When I created a new GPT partition on /dev/sda, it wiped my beautiful Ventoy 😢

shadowintheday2, (edited )

I thoroughly backup up my slow nvme before installing a new faster one. I actually didn’t even want to reuse the installation, just the files at /home.

So I mounted it at /mnt/backupnvme0n1, 2, etc and rsynced

The first few dry runs showed a lot of data was redundant, so I geniously thought “wow I should delete some of these”. And that’s when I did a classic sudo rm -rf in the /mnt root folder instead of /mnt/dirthathadthoseredundantfiles

Jean_le_Flambeur, (edited )

Types

rm -r -f Presses strg+v (instead of strg + shift + v)

Hits enter

Maschine proceeds to delete the home folder as the garbage that comes when pressing normal strg+v gets interpreted so…

timkenhan,

Don’t get me started.

There are good reasons why I have personal “production system” to do my work with.

squid_slime,
@squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

I was new to Linux, I made the not so calculated decision to use manjaro as my daily, deleted xorg to in an attempt to reinstall xorg to then hopefully fix the stuttering. Everything went wrong, no display obviously, /boot/ files where corrupt. I now use arch and am wiser

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