I’ve not broken my setup (yet), but I’ve came close to it one time when I accidentally made a lesser fork bomb.

I was writting a function that would display how many jobs I currently had in the command prompt, but when writting the function instead of calling jobs I called the function itself, sourced .bashrc and now everything was laggy (my pc only has 4GB). Thankfully I was able to shut down the terminal before my swap got completely consumed.

I ran firejail config or something, which replaces a lot of home directory app files. Not sure if binaries or desktop entries.

But things broke, randomly, screenshots not working, not even inside firefox etc. I reinstalled the system and imported the home folder… and it was there again!

The only time was within a VM. I accidentally wrote

rm -rf ./* while my cwd was /

I use absolute paths with -rf now, to prevent the error again.

Every other breakage I had was with apt shitting itself. It has always been fixable just annoying.

I now use Fedora, to prevent the error again.

I had issues with a new version of glibc that prevented me from working on music in Ardour on Manjaro. I then proceeded to force-downgrade glibc (in the hopes of letting me get back to work) and that broke sudo and some other things, which I found out after rebooting. That was an interesting learning experience. Now I snapshot before I do stupid stuff. :]

sudo rm -f /lib /usr/share/backup/blah blah.tar.gz

Note the space.

I don’t know if that counts, but on a fresh default Debian Stable system, my cat walked across the keyboard and the DE crashed.
I could still switch to another TTY and reboot via command line.
After the reboot, I was greeted by a blinking cursor and nothing else. Had to reinstall.

Not strictly Linux related, but in college I was an IT assistant. One day I was given a stack of drives to run through dariks boot and nuke.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think midway through, my laptop shut off.

Guess who picked the wrong drive to wipe with DBAN :)

chown 777 everything

First time trying Linux I went with an arch install because I Googled “best version of Linux” and went with arch. Followed a guide to the point of drive formatting and I decided to go with a setup with drive encryption. I didn’t understand what I was doing, ended up locking myself out of my hard drives and couldn’t get windows to reinstall on them. I used a MacBook for a week until I installed Ubuntu and managed to wipe and reset my drives and reinstalled. Needless to say I am going to read up a little more before I try that again.

I’ve broken systems far too many times in the last 24 years, since Mandrake 6.x, to count:

• I’ve dd a disk or more
• I’ve rm *
• I’ve chmod
• I’ve brought down the network, with every intention tar it would come back - on a remote box
• I’ve failed to RTFM far too many times

I recently broke the networking stack by uninstalling ca-certificates

I was using a slightly risky command to delete unneeded packages, and for some reason ca-certificates was on the list

At least the fix was simple. Boot the rescue iso and reinstall them

I once deleted the network system in alpine. I’d been having some trouble with with the default one (I think wpa_supplicant) so I decided to try the other one (I think iwctl). But I thought that there might be problems with havung both of them so before I installed iwctl I deleted wpa_supplicant (thinking that it was more of a config utility than the whole network system), only to find that I couldn’t connect to the internet to install iwctl.

I deleted bash on my work computer one week into the job 🫠

It was my first time using a Linux GUI. I was comfortable with CLI, but it was my first time having it installed on a laptop instead of just sshing into a server somewhere.

So naturally, instead of learning how the GUI worked, I tried changing it to be exactly like Windows. I was doing things like making it so I could double click shell scripts and other code files and they would run instead of opening them up in an editor. I think you see where this is going, but I sure as hell didn’t.

Well, one of my coworkers comes over and asks me to run this code on this device we were developing. We were still in the very early stages of development, we didn’t even have git set up, so he brought the code over on a USB stick. I pop it into my laptop. I went to check it once by opening it in an editor by double clicking on it… Only it ran the code that was written for our device on my laptop instead of opening in an editor.

To this day, I have no idea what it did to fuck my laptop so bad. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out what was wrong, but I was so inexperienced with Linux, that I decided to just reinstall the OS. I had only installed it the day before anyway, so I wasn’t losing much.

Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most “funny” fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.

The monitor didn’t die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.