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:

$ 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.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    0·
    8 months ago

    I once just uninstalled sudo and replaced it with doas. Turns out, the shutdown process needs sudo and a lot more. So I am still using my system since then, without shutting down.

    No joking, I use Fedora Atomic and can not break my system… unless you mess up your dotfiles, and a lot more.

    I also put a drive into my /etc/fstab once without the nofail argument.

    No idea why that is not set by default, but when removing that drive my system couldnt boot and I exited to a very scary dracut shell.