Linux

Encrypting a drive with Linux, then encrypting a VM within Linux with my Bitcoin wallet information in it, which I was gifted 5 bitcoin before it was popular and just forgot about it. I was 13 at the time and didn't know what I was doing. Lost all my passwords, or I might have even just wiped my entire drive. Got a pile of hard drives to go through and see which one has Linux on it, but that's only the first step.

It always involves

sudo rm -rf *

Bought a Samsung mini laser printer and found that it is Windows only. I gave it to a neighbour.

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

When installing arch, I wanted to kill my old drive. So 2 times in a row, I forgot to look up my drives Name, and proceeded to wipe my USB stick with /dev/random. 2 times.

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.

I don't think I've ever lost more time than I've gained in knowledge from the mistakes, if that makes any sense.

Never lost any money with linux.

DE hopping/Switching to a new Distro without testing it in a VM

I'm actually amazed I haven't had any costly mistakes yet considering I'm the kind of person to say "it's just dd, what's the worst that can happen? it'll be fine no worries". Since I've installed Arch a year ago I've been constantly expecting to catastrophically break something... and my system is still running, somehow. It's very perplexing.

Not Linux, but OpenBSD. I got a sun ultra 5 for free so I decided to make a router out of it. After some research OpenBSD looked like the best option. I bought a pf book and started writing configs. After about a week I had a really nice router that did exactly what I asked it. This was back in the early days of xbox360 so getting all of the port forwarding right was kind of a pain since we had three of them connected in our apartment along with all of the computers. Then the harddrive crashed and I hadn't made any backups. That was a lot of work down the drain.

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.

I tried to enroll secure boot without understanding what I'm doing. I locked myself out of the motherboard.

Also when you accidentally create a directory called '~' the command rm -r ~ is not the right one...

I tried to enroll secure boot without understanding what I'm doing. I locked myself out of the motherboard.

Also when you accidentally create a directory called '~' the command rm -r ~ is not the right one...

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 wasted a few hours, trying to make some flatpak apps do as I wanted, before I understood how flatpaks works, and why they are not always a good solution.

Bluetooth didn't work on my laptop. Got new bluetooth card (exact same type). Bluetooth still didn't work.

Turns out:

1. The specific card doesn't support Linux.
2. My laptop has a hardware whitelist in the BIOS that prevents me from installing any other card.
3. My headphones don't support USB bluetooth.

None, using Linux never been a mistake, every mishaps is a learning process

Upgrade my PC. I put new parts in but I dont notice any real gains because my system was already running well.

My most costly mistake was probably installing gentoo on a Chromebook. That took so long and was both fun and extremely frustrating. It was working but now I'm getting these weird drive errors because the entire thing is loaded on an SD to avoid using the Chromebooks 15gb internal storage.

Buying a Framework 16. Never again.

distrohopping. timewaster.

dd if=fedora.iso of=my ssd instead of flash drive :’(

I once reset a computer and forgot I had a Bitcoin wallet on it. So I reset the drive and forgot to keep the home partition.

It had multiple Bitcoin back when it was less than 10ish. Mined with a bunch of people for the fun of it. Thought nothing of it until recently lol. That hard drive died a long time ago and is in some dump somewhere. I guess I helped keep the price for everyone else. So your welcome?