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.

  • AVincentInSpaceEnglish
    81·
    7 months ago
    • Accidentally did a partial upgrade of Arch Linux in which I upgraded libssl but not systemd (which depended on it) (which refused to start becuase one of its dependencies had been upgraded to an incompatible version) (which caused the kernel to panic immediately on bootup because the init process died) (writing init=bash on the kernel command line gave me a shell but not network access) (i had to boot off a liveusb, chroot into my /, and run pacman -Syu from there in order to fix it)
    • Use Ubuntu, at all, for anything, ever