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?

forvirretfugl,

Wanted a cool bootscreen on my Nixos machine - commented out the bootloader to troubleshoot, why my meme-boot-picture wouldn’t show - after rebooting, it loaded straight into the BIOS and finally realized what I had done… Was able to fix it thankfully

the16bitgamer,
@the16bitgamer@lemmy.world avatar

stupid was when I wanted to test Linux Mint on an external SSD, and didn’t check that the bootloader wasn’t going to overwrite my internal drive’s.

So anyway I’m running Linux Mint now.

fl42v,

That’s an interesting way to distro hop for sure

martinb,

It’s a fine distribution. I have it on my desktop and at least one laptop. But yes, a weird way to decide to distro hop 🤣

the16bitgamer,
@the16bitgamer@lemmy.world avatar

I was on Manjaro, and I didn’t want to put the effort in for a third time just to break it again. While I prefer arch based distros, I’ve been liking Mint since I can almost use it without a terminal like manjaro.

exocortex,

Oh, i have a brilliant one:

A few years ago i spent a lot of time converting .flac-files into .ogg-files in order to put on my oldschool iPod. As I did a lot of repetitive typing - entering $dir / for file in flac ; do convert etc / mkdir -p $somewhere/$artist/$album / mv $somewhere/.ogg->$new_dir/ and so on - I thought: “hm lets just write a loop over loops for all the artists here and then all the albums and at the same time create the nested directories somewhere else… hm actually in the home directory… and later love everything on the iPod at once.”

so i was in my music folder with the artists-folders i wanted to convert. i did something wrong

So i did my complicated script directly in the shell. I made something wrong and instead of creating a folder “/artist/album” I created 3 folders in my current working directory: “”, “artist” and “album”. hmph dammit gotta try again… but first : i have to clean up these useless folders in the current dir. so i type of course this: "$ rm -r ~ artist album " after about 5 seconds of wondering why it took so long i realized my error. o_O I stopped the running command, but it was (of course) too late and i bricked my current installation. All the half-deleted config files made or impossible to start normally and extremely tedious to repair it by hand, so i reinstalled.

StorageAware,

It was only in a container on a Chromebook, but I’ll share it anyway. One time, I had installed Android Studio but found it mildly annoying that I got a line when using apt about Android Studio and some error on a certain line of this one file. I believe the file was something related to dpkg, and after changing some things within the file, I seemed to have broken apt. Luckily, I had a backup, but it was a few days old, so I had to reinstall some apps.

herc3141, (edited )

Backed up the whole disk image to an external drive because I didn’t have time for a proper backup but knew I would need some of those files later.

Installed a fresh new OS on the same disk, used it for a couple of months.

Needed to make some space on the external drive I had the backup on so I’ll just delete the backed up system files from it.

cd /mnt/external_drive

rm - r /usr /boot …

As you can probably see, a fresh new install was happening again

Scribbd,

Took me a solid second to get it as well.

martinb,

☠️

FractalsInfinite,

Let’s see: Unintentionally making a proxy accessible to anyone online

Accidentally deallocating an ext4 partition and then having to run testdisk on it

Trying to manually create a grub entry and corrupting the bootloader

Installing a arch derivertive and having it silently overwrite grub

Installing puppy Linux and then trying to get it to use apt

Incorrect use of ppa’s on mint resulting in very old packages being installed

And many others besides

papertowels,

The first time I enabled o auth for something self hosted, I gave access to anyone with a Gmail account.

olutukko,

I dont remember what I did when I was stoned. The next day I tried to do normal sudo dnf install and it doesnt recognize any command anymore. I tried restarting it and I cant login anymore because the login scripts dont work. Not that funny but just happened and weirdest way I have broke it

ClusterBomb,
@ClusterBomb@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

sudo apt remove python3

Thinking I would install a more recent version. 😂

Ederhex,

Classic

fragment,

I deleted bash on my work computer one week into the job 🫠

martinb,

csh FTW eh 🤣

HotChickenFeet, (edited )

Installed python3 before it was made the native python on the dist. Half broke everything, including apt & python. So I uninstalled it, and then everything was broken. Finally got python3 reinstalled, and lived with it kindof working & awful distribution updates.

I have finally freed myself of that prison last month, by nuking everything and starting fresh.

martinb,

You can have both python 2 and 3 on the system. It just depends upon which is the default as to how much you break it 👍 The symlink to /usr/bin/python is the important bit for most software. For deb-based at least, update-alternative is your friend.

HotChickenFeet,

I’ll happily say I must have overlooked something, but I did try using update-alternatives. I don’t remember all the nuts and bolts from the start, but it involves python3 and distribution upgrades. I spent a good number of nights over the years trying to unmess it up, and am happy to never think about it ever again.

marionberrycore,

About a year ago I somehow fucked up installing a new window manager on my tablet so badly I had to start from scratch - to this day I have no idea what happened there, but it just wouldn’t boot properly or anything after that 🤷 I needed it for school pretty quickly though so my top priority was getting it working again, so I set up a fresh install instead of continuing to fuck around.

Not the same level of destruction, but I fucked up my first ever install a couple months in trying to resolve dependencies related to python and wine, which is why I’m more interested in sandboxing whenever feasible these days. After only two months I guess I had been fucking around with linux long enough to have a little too much unearned confidence, lol

HuntressHimbo,

So I am sort of an embedded developer, and I like to mess around with weird configurations. So the craziest experiment I did was trying to reflash a rasberry pi from a system running in the pi’s RAM. It honestly might have worked, but during the prep work I forgot to resize the filesystem before mucking with the paritions and had to reflash the normal way before I could try again. Ended up just turning it into a pihole instead, but I still learned a lot about pivot_root

ArmainAP,

Somehow I found ways to remove and break the GUI multiple times in multiple ways in multiple distros.

Different scenarios, different times, different issues trying to “fix”. My usual fix after this was always to copy what I think I still had important and then move on with a reinstall.

Recently I have been playing with ZorinOS and broke it in the same way by fidgeting with pipewire. Distro hoped to Fedora Silverblue due to the immutable filesystem. I wonder if I will break this one in a way I cannot revert it easily with rpm-ostree. I almost feel challenged.

Head,

I deleted the entire taskbar.

MTK,

sudo apt autoremove

Who ever made this shit and then decided to always show you this message that you should do it. What a dick

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