8mo ago

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

 undefined

    
$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

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301 comments

If you count Android too, then this: I got my first Android phone when I was 10 or 11 and rooted it on the first day of having it. This was during a time when we were all still using ClockworkMod because TWRP didn't exist yet, and I somehow ended up with a system without a kernel. Panic ensued, and I spent that entire night (like 10 hours) digging through xda in order to find a tutorial on how to get this damn phone to run again. Imagine having to tell your parents "I broke my phone I got yesterday." I did get it working at like 6:30 AM. Fun times.
- what's the fun in modding if not the two hours where you think you've bricked everything and you're scrambling through a 52 page post on XDA trying to find someone with your same problem
- I did pretty much exactly this on a Galaxy S1 (i9000) that was old even when I got it, but my uncle who gave it to me said that to make it usable I needed to install Cyanogenmod.
  I thought I fully bricked the phone trying and it actually sat dormant for years afterwards until I re-found the Odin backups I had taken, and was able to fully fix and restore it. Unfortunately by that time, nearly no ROM existed that was both up to date and a usable speed.
- Oh man,, Clockwork mod, that takes me back. Although I had my android phone for a while before I built up the courage to root it, in part due to stories like yours

301 comments