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?

UnfortunateShort,

Accidentally deleted system Python, which on GNOME meant my DE was toast as well. Luckily very freshly set up, so no harm done.

Related note, add this in your shell profile:

bash
export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true

proper scripting language
set PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV true

Delta_44,

What does it do? Is it some kind of failsafe?

WalrusByte,
@WalrusByte@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Delta_44,

Nice! Thanks!

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

technohacker,
@technohacker@programming.dev avatar

source ~/.bash_history

fl42v,

That’s the scariest horror story in 2 words I’ve seen so far

technohacker,
@technohacker@programming.dev avatar

I’m genuinely having a chuckle at how shocked people are at my submission, made my day xD

fl42v,

I mean, it’s simple, elegant, and destructive AF given the right circumstances. Basically a chaos grenade we didn’t realize existed

papertowels,

And also a very understandable mistake, to boot.

ReverendIrreverence,
@ReverendIrreverence@lemmy.ml avatar

“Oh My…” thought in a George Takei voice

catastrophicblues,

Oh no. That fits the bill perfectly lol.

omidmnz, (edited )

Reminded me of this: github.com/jtroo/kanata/issues/595

Same concept, different granularity!

caseyweederman,

Dear god

pendulous,

Can a linux noob get an explanation of this?

jaykay,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

New fear unlocked

tubbadu,

Jesus Christ. It would be a good idea to format that file to have an exit as first line to avoid this

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

skeletorfw,

My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.

And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.

Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.

Bonus round

Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.

BestBouclettes,

CTRL-C-ing apt because it looked stuck for more than 10 minutes. I don’t recommend doing it.

maynarkh,

Haven’t used apt in a while, is it not atomic? What happens if you mess with it?

BestBouclettes,

I don’t think it is, if it doesn’t run its course on its own, you’re screwed. It’s Debian so you can recover, but, at least for me, it was painful.

Cwilliams,

Man, gotta love apt sometimes

BestBouclettes,

apt is great, but yeah, if it’s gonna fail, let it fail on its own.

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