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?

drmoodmood, (edited )
@drmoodmood@lemmy.ml avatar

I had issues with a new version of glibc that prevented me from working on music in Ardour on Manjaro. I then proceeded to force-downgrade glibc (in the hopes of letting me get back to work) and that broke sudo and some other things, which I found out after rebooting. That was an interesting learning experience. Now I snapshot before I do stupid stuff. :]

Lightfire228,

I recently broke the networking stack by uninstalling ca-certificates

I was using a slightly risky command to delete unneeded packages, and for some reason ca-certificates was on the list

At least the fix was simple. Boot the rescue iso and reinstall them

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.

tanuki,

The first time I wanted to try Linux I did by installing elementary OS in dual boot mode (with windows) and everything went well, I played with it a bit and then I returned to Windows…

So, few days after that I realize that I have a lot of space in the Linux partition and I didn’t have plans to use it anymore so I go to drive’s & partition’s manager on windows to delete my elementary OS partition…

Oh Lord when I restarted my PC, grub was showing nonsenses and I couldn’t boot on windows again, I was in panic, I spent the rest of the day trying to fix grub to boot windows. At the end of the day I did it and save all my files and I uninstall grub properly, but what a day 😂

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.

tigerjerusalem, (edited )

sudo apt upgrade -y

To this day I can’t figure out why it killed the GUI and all terminal commands on a Mint install…

Menteros,

I stay away from apt. apt-update for me has never messed like apt has.

Mayonnaise,

I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.

tigerjerusalem,

You’re right, I messed up - I always switch between the two, because “update” makes more sense in my head. I fixed the text.

devnull406,

Connect via ssh to my home server from work

Using a cli torrent client to download stuff

Decide I need a VPN.

Install VPN again from CLI

Run VPN which disconnects my ssh connection

Even when I get home, the server is headless so I have to locate a keyboard and mouse before I can fix.

fl42v,

Dang, similar stuff happened to me on nixos. Had to instruct one of the relatives on how to reboot the machine and choose a previous generation in the boitloader 🤣

KingThrillgore, (edited )
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

I had rEFInd and GRUB installed entirely by accident, and a botched update for Arch hosed my entire EFI setup making it impossible to boot Linux or Windows w/o a LiveCD. Thankfully it self repaired once I nuked rEFInd. I ended up going back to Ubuntu, but I hate snaps. I still would recommend Arch for most Linux users who want the power windows.

quantumfoam, (edited )

I once did an apt-get upgrade in the middle of when debian testing was recompiling all packages and moving to a new gcc version. I get it, using testing invites stuff like this. But come on, there should at least be a way to warn people beforehand.

fl42v,

That’s kinda weird: shouldn’t they recompile everything first and then replace repos’ contents?

xavier666,

Me: I want to change my car tire

Car: Hey, your car is going at 60 mph now. Do you want to change your tire now?

Me: Is it not possible?

Car: It’s your car, anything is possible with enough effort. As per Google one guy managed to change a tire of a bullock cart while it was moving at 2 mph.

Me: Sounds good. Let’s gooo!

This is the experience for Linux tinkerers.

quantumfoam,

In my case it was:

Me: I want to change my car tire, and i naturally assume we are parked safely in the garage. This is a routine maintenance thing after all.

Car: Sure thing! bork

Me: Umm, why are wrapped around a tree?

Car: Well, we were currently going 60mph, and we posted about it on this website.

Me: Why is there no warning that tells me that doing maintenance now will crash my car?

Car: Well like i said, there is, and it is on this website you should have gone to.

xavier666,

and we posted about it on this website.

In my personal experience, these sort of things happen rarely, unless you are using some sort of rolling-release distribution. For all my mission-critical docker apps, I wait for at least a week after a major update has been pushed and check the dev website.

BradleyUffner,

One time I rebooted. The system never recovered.

sfgifz,

This thread should be renamed to 101 reasons why business give Windows or Macs to their employees.

fl42v,

It’s not like you can’t shoot yourself in the foot while using windows (not sure about macs, tho, but likely just as well). I remember breaking windows countless times while figuring out what service crap can be disabled, removing edge or defender, yada yada.

On the contrary, in my experience, if you’re not actively messing with linux, it’s overall more stable than windows. Like I had to install windows on an actual machine a short while ago, and it was a clusterheck. Drivers failed to auto install (touchpad/trackpoint drivers, for Chaos’s sake), random bsod after an hour or so of normal use, etc. As for linux breaking on itself, I remember like 3 times that happened with me in my ~5 yrs of daily driving different distros, and 2 of those were fixable by switching to a tty (the 3rd didn’t boot, as far as I remember, due to some incompatibility between bedrock and arch).

iegod,

A system update broke a dependency for libre Sprite, which hasn’t had an update in like two years. You can say they should but let’s be real, my apps shouldn’t break with an update. One of my laptop needs was portable graphics creation. This broke one of my major use cases. Yay.

Adanisi,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Some Windows updates completely break the whole system. It’s not unique to Linux based systems.

drathvedro,

Actually, I have a story that I’d consider an achievement even though it was extremely stupid and by all accounts should’ve bricked the system but didnt.

So I was on windows and wanted to install linux as a dual-boot on the main drive. The problem was that my mobo didnt like this particular and the only flash drive I’ve had, dropping it out mid-boot, before I got any usable terminal, so a usual install method wasn’t an option. So I had this crazy idea to start a vmware vm in windows and pass the linux iso and the boot drive directly to it and try to install it live over the running system. Unfortunately, vmware guys thought of this and there’s a check that disallows passing the boot drive to vms. So i created a bunch of .vmdks for another drive and fiddled with them in notepad until I somehow managed to trick vmware and at some point it started booting the same windows copy that I was sitting on. I quickly powered it off, added the linux iso and proceeded to install like I usually would. It did involve some partition shuffling, but, somehow, it went smoothly, linux installed, grub caught on, and even windows somehow survived, even though it was physically moved around on the disk. It serms that vmware later patched this out, because later in an attempt to re-create the trick of running the same copy of windows twice, but after updates to both windows and vmware, I was met with the same old error that boot drive is not allowed when trying to add that same virtual drive I had laying around.

JATtho,

I had a similar debacle, when I managed to corrupt a btrfs file system to point it wouldn’t mount again…

I was preparing it to have as my main system on bare hardware. I had accidentally mounted the same block device simultaneously in the host and guest: kablamo silent corruption and all 5 hours of progress lost.^*^ :(

*shred the guest VM, host was ok.

deafboy,
@deafboy@lemmy.world avatar

I had a similar setup once. Dualboot, plus the VM with the same physical disk, to access windows, while running linux.

All it took was a small distraction… I’ve missed the grub timeout, and accidentally booted the same ubuntu partition in a VM that was running on the real HW. To shreds…

fl42v,

Allrighty, now we officially need a program (I’m hesitant to call it malware since technically it’s for the user’s good XD) that covertly replaces a running copy of windows with linux… Besides, I think it was possible before to install stuff like Ubuntu directly from windows?

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

papertowels,

Not strictly Linux related, but in college I was an IT assistant. One day I was given a stack of drives to run through dariks boot and nuke.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think midway through, my laptop shut off.

Guess who picked the wrong drive to wipe with DBAN :)

ulterno,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

I’m not sure how funny this will be, but here’s how I broke my system twice in a single case. Step by step:

  1. Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
  2. After a few updates, there was a problem with Plasma. Applications were not starting from the panels or the .desktop files (they worked from the terminal. The terminal emulator was in startup and worked that way)
  3. After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded… Worked for a while
  4. While using pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause a pacman warning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1
  5. To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using pacman -Ql and cp to copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way with pacman and chroot didn’t work because glibc is needed by bash).
  6. Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn’t checked the intermediate output from pacman -Ql, which was telling cp to copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn’t given the -r to cp) BREAK 2

In the end, I just made a new installation, this time with a new home and hand-picked whatever settings I wanted from the previous home, Viva la multi-HDD

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