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.
One time on Manjaro i had a dependency issue regarding python3. So i just removed it. The I watched in horror as i saw what packages depend on python3, including pacman and manjaro-system, but did not dare to interrupt the process and end up with a half-broken system, and my curiosity wanted to see it play out. Then I rebooted, and thus legally turned my Manjaro system into a half-working Arch install. It even displayed the OS as Arch Linux. Still managed to fix it without reinstalling by downloading the package files from http mirrors, but if i was smart the entire thing should have taken 5 minutes instead of a full afternoon. Was a valuable learning experience tho