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kiol @lemmy.world

What have been your costliest mistakes in using Linux?

For me it is not recording credentials with the assumption I would simply remember them later, while having every opportunity to archive them before eventually forgetting. Also, not keeping detailed enough notes & photos of exactly how my hardware is attached.

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  • Hibernating my computer and then forgetting about it and booting into a different OS (Fedora Silverblue) on the same partition (BTRFS subvolume stuff). AND THEN TRYING TO RESUME THE HIBERNATED OS (Arch btw).

    my filesystem was pretty much unrecoverable and it was my fault

  • My payroll company came out with a be version that won't work in Linux. They wouldn't accommodate me and I was too deep into their ecosystem to change companies so I ended up having to buy a Windows license so I could run a virtual machine every time I had to do payroll.

    Edit: My mistake was getting too dependent on a company that doesn't care about Linux users.

  • I bought a National Instrument's data acquisition card (PCIe-6535B) not knowing that National Instruments is not very Linux-friendly and I was not able to get it working. At least it was a used card so I did not pay to much for it, but I learned my lesson not to assume compatibility.

    Once I also used 'rm -rvf *' from my home directory while SSH'd into a supercomputer (I made a syntax error when trying to cd into the folder that I actually wanted to delete). I was able to get my data restored from a backup, but sending that e-mail was a bit embarrassing 😆

  • I've been running Linux since 2011, starting with our data recovery and antivirus scanning system at the computer repair shop I was working for at the time.

    Even my boss didn't understand why I wanted to install Linux. Keep in mind, this is back when the TDSS/Alureon rootkit was going around on Windows systems.

    I explained it like it was, that if our main backup/antivirus system was running the same OS as the infected computers coming in, then it was only a matter of time before our main system got infected.

    So, he accepted my advice and let me set everything up. More or less just the bare basics really, smartmontools, gparted, firefox, google earth (just because), and a few other relevant programs to help with our daily tasks.

    Then, one day when I was off work, a new employee decided to install some plugin into Firefox to share bookmarks and stuff across different devices..

    Somehow, he borked the main tech user account, it wouldn't even login to the user interface anymore :(

    I had to spend a few hours, with the skeptical boss over my shoulder, waiting to see if I could get the system back running right again.

    And so I did, while learning lots of new things at the same time. When I learned the hotkeys to switch to other terminal sessions, then I figured out how to create a new account, erase the old account, and get logged back in and running.

    The customer data backup drive was separate and detached through all that, so customer data was safe the whole time.

    The boss almost said fuckit, reinstall Windows, but I was persistent. And that system helped salvage over 200 systems with the TDSS rootkit, which would have almost certainly doomed our backup system if it was running Windows.

    I told that new guy to never fuck with my operating system setup or configuration again, at least not before consulting me and getting approval or even assistance first.

    When you got a bare minimum of the past 100 customers' data backed up and virus checked, you don't dick around with the main backup system.

    So, honestly, I can't think of a single truly costly mistake that Linux has cost me..

    As far as that other employee that messed it up for a bit, well I dunno, it wasn't too long after that the boss fired him...

  • back around 2013 I was working on a school project, did the ol' get out my laptop without putting on my glasses bit, and ran "rm -rf" on the wrong folder because the characters sorta looked similar to my farsighted eyes.

    Since I didn't make backups, that was a few weeks of work down the drain.

  • Let me count the ways:

    • Edited /etc/sudoers with vi instead of visudo.
    • The classic rm -fr /
    • The typical chown myuser: / -R
    • Removed the bootloader dunno why
    • Some shenanigans involving dd and the wrong device

    I could go on, but my memory tends to erase the painful memories.

  • Using topgrade without realizing what I was doing. Seemed okay for a few days until my headphones suddenly jacked to 1000 and began some sort of alarm-like buzzing. Thankfully they were not on my head, because it was so loud my gf and I thought there was some sort of fire alarm going off. This was on EndeavourOS.

    I tried topgrade again, not knowing that the app was what had done it. This time on vanilla Arch. I was not so fortunate this round and I took the sound full blast into my earholes. I reacted in milliseconds and Hulk-smash threw them halfway across the room. No lasting damage since I was so quick, but fuck me wearing headphones is more dangerous than I thought.

    Luckily I've learned from past mistakes and made Timeshift restore points before every update. I reverted to before the topgrade changes and my distro has still been holding strong since then. I think I'll make my own alias for full upgrade and call it updawg.

  • Sometimes I forget why I did something and undo it. Then, when I remember, I hope I made a text file documenting what I did to begin with. If not, back to search.

50 comments