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?

Adanisi, (edited )
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Writing and running a script to delete the first 2 characters from all files and folders recursively.

It started backtracking to my home folder. :/

siha,

at’s a funny story, hope you got everything backed up

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

timkenhan,

Don’t get me started.

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

Engywuck,

“Updating” a 5.2 RedHat install with a 6.0 Mandrake CD-ROM (or the opposite, can’t remember right now…). Fun stuff.

Kidplayer_666,

Man, this was a few months back. I’ve got fedora asahi Linux (Linux on an ARM Mac) and I was trying to install Pycharm to play a bit with Python. Unfortunately, they did not have it packaged for arm, so I had to download a pre compiled tar or zip folder. I test it, see that it is an assortment of bin folders and alike, and decide to put it all elsewhere so it wouldn’t get lost. So I put it on the root and merge the folders. I think immediately “wait this is stupid” and decide to get Pycharm out of there. (I was on nautilus with root privileges), so i simply Ctrl-Z outa there. It shows a warning whether I wanted to delete 4000 files, but because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise what rhay meant. So I did it. I then continue on with my life, and find myself unable to open apps. I was fairly confused, as the apps I already had open still worked. I decide to try to restart the laptop. It is when I see that there is no restart button anymore that I realise what I did, and I just think to myself. I’ll be dammed if this survives a restart, im already screwed so it doesn’t matter. (It didn’t survive the reboot, had to install from scratch. At least an excuse to use the K desktop environment)

captainjaneway,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

Linux Mint: removed all taskbars from the desktop. I was hoping it would just allow me to reset them to the default. But in reality, it breaks the GUI and it’s very hard to reset from the GUI. Suddenly my keystrokes weren’t being detected and I couldn’t open up applications with any sort of regularity. After a lot of dicking around, I got the terminal working so I could reset Cinnamon.

It’s not the worst way I’ve broken a machine. But it was one of the most annoying.

Petter1,

Always remember, there is always a “terminal” accessible: Don’t forget poor tty

Nibodhika,

One thing I learnt a while back is that if you break your GUI you can always use Ctrl+Alt+F<1-9> to go to different terminals to try to solve it. Worst case scenario I would do something like mv .config .config.bkp and sudo systemctl restart that should hopefully get you back to default settings on the UI.

Source: been there, done that. Not exactly your error but similar enough.

d950,

When Ubuntu 16.04 had just been released, I tried upgrading my 14.04, the whole system broke and I had to install another os (Manjaro won).

That day I learned Ubuntu too can be a bit stupid.

Static_Rocket,
@Static_Rocket@lemmy.world avatar

This is where someone tracks down an upgrade path chart you didn’t know existed and points out some goofy intermediary release, not an lts for some reason, that you were supposed to upgrade to first…

AnthropomorphicCat,
@AnthropomorphicCat@lemmy.world avatar

One day on my main Arch installation I created a container inside a directory, and “booted” into it by using systemd-nspawn. When I was done with it I decided to do a rm -rf / inside the container just to be funny. Then I noticed that my DE on the host froze and I couldn’t do anything. Then I realized that systemd-nspawn mounts some important host’s directories on the container, and I deleted those when I did the rm -rf /. I didn’t lose anything, but it was scary.

stinerman,
@stinerman@midwest.social avatar

I’ve literally done the rm -rf / thing. I thought I was in a different subdirectory, but I was in / and did rm -rf .

When it didn’t return after half a second, I looked at the command again and hit CTRL+C about 20 times in the span of 3 seconds.

I had to rebuild the install, but luckily didn’t lose anything in /home.

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

med,

Ubuntu GUI/apt fail

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’

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.

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.

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 😢

Petter1,

For me, it was a simple enabling of AUR im manjaro, twice Now I use arch, lol.

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