What are some of the easiest ways for a beginner to make their system untable when they start tinkering with it?
Do literally anything but use foolproof desktop apps in a system that cannot revert to a known state.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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When you try to run a thing that everyone assures you now works on Linux flawlessly but for some reason it does not work for you in particular so you dwell deep into troubleshooting and try everything possible until you break something but then you figure out how to make it work without breaking your system so you re-install OS and start again for it to just suddenly work without the workaround just so you stumble on the same scenario with another program.
Moving some packages (especially libraries) onto an unstable branch while keeping others back on a stable one. It probably won't fuck you immediately, but when it does it'll be a bastard to diagnose because you will have forgotten what you did.
once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:
- deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
- switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
- playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
- bypassing the package manager (especially installing with
curl | sudo sh) - changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
bypassing the package manager (especially installing with curl | sudo sh
I'll admit that I've done this with a few things that I wanted to install but weren't in my repo...
- changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
That's the only part I disagree with. Software not updated in a long time can easily become a risk.
Everything else though, spot in.
aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”
Looking at it from that standpoint, you're onto something on that as well.
delete everything in /tmp; you're not really using it anyways and you'll get more disk space. lol
i literally used this same logic when i merged the contents of c:\windows & c:\win32 because there were so many duplicate files and folders and i needed to recover the free space.
sometimes i'm thankful for my cluelessness; examples like this paint me into corners and this particular corner was the impetus behind my exploration into linux; which has sustained my career for the last 25ish years through several once-in-a-lifetime economic recessions and multiple personal setbacks.
linux is the best mistake i've ever made.
I'm curious what you work as? Sysadmin?
Janitor.
So SysAdmin, gotcha
i've been accused of that along with several other slurs like systems engineer and cloud operations engineer and it systems architecture analyst and software engineer. lol
i'm a software developer atm, but my current gig has a LOT of overlap with all of those other four letter word titles that i dare not repeat in decent company. lol
Instability you ask? This is like a slow creep to instability and freeze your system. It's called the Bash Fork Bomb (look it up if you want), but it's a copy/paste you put in and it slows your system down by consuming all the system resources and cause it to lock up HARD. It goes away after a system reboot, though.
I was going to post the code here, but decided to play nice. But if you are curious:
https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/
(edit: Made 'slow' 'slows')
Overclocking
Trying to mount an iso image in the terminal and accidentally un-mounting your root drive.
Totally didn't do that before...nope not even once, definitely not twice >.>
Apparently running an update on Fedora. My flatpaks were broken on Fedora 40, so I thought it's a configuration issue on my part and did a clean reinstall when Fedora 41 came out. Issues were not present... until I ran an update.
Why did that happen?
I actually don't know. I tried investigating the issue, using different users, or trying from a clean install, or without my configs. I'm not sure about the sources of my issues. I know that one of the issues I had was unrelated (Tabliss in Vivaldi), but I'm not sure if the Flatpak issues and the Steam & Lutris Gaming issues were related, but I don't seem to have those issues on PopOS. For now at least. I haven't done any gaming yet but the flatpaks seem to be okay.
Go through all installed packages and remove "bloat".
Add third party repositories.
Removing bloat doesn’t necessarily make things unstable. I remove all the games from my KDE Plasma installs. The primary mistake that can occur in removing non-essential programs is ignoring the list of programs that this is a dependency of or also removes.
Blobby Volley
Ahaha. That hurts.
Pro-Tip: Even if you don't program in Python, it might be necessary for several of your applications.
New linux user goes online to find out how to list installed packages in the terminal. Starts removing the ones they don't recognise.
Yeah that was me a bunch of years ago, thinking I'd cut the unnecessary dependencies from my system.
I learned they were not so unnecessary.
Ah yes, I've made that mistake, too.
Also, going through Synaptic and deleting everything you don't know.
Synaptic is a new Linux user's worst enemy. Makes it too easy to just break stuff.
Recompile your kernel whilst drunk
I am drunk. I wish you hadn't suggested that.
So anyway, what are the pros and cons?
Pro: you have a custom kernel.
Con: the next morning, you can have a non-functioning computer with no idea of what you did.
sudo rm -rf /boot /efi
It's far more dangerous to run it without a space between the - and rf
fuck, stupid mobile
Mess with grub, without really understanding what you're doing.
Also, "meep".
Shit, I've done that!
Lol, see the other comment here! :)
Anybody that claims to know what they're doing with grub is a fool or a liar.
Just my experience, I was unable to log in after trying to add samba to my installation. Had to boot into live usb and reset my password.
Maube I'm just bad and it's not samba.
Not sure if this is what happend, but there is a sync option in samba where you can sync your samba user password with login user password.
However this needs explicitly be stated in the samba.conf and needs some further configuration. It could be possible that the installation fuckedup something with passwd.
Just guessing here, I played a bit arround with samba and password syncing.
My thought as well. Maybe sync was in default configuration or I just copy pasted it without reading.
Long story short, I have no idea if system user passwords and sama user passwords are the same thing, how to set them up (if they are not the same), or how to make samba use same user accounts and passwords (so that I don't have to remember one more password). So I just gave up.
I was trying to do everything according to arch wiki, but either samba is overcomplicated for no reason, or the article is just not written well.
Installing GPU drivers :). Bonus if you need to use CUDA on top of that