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.

  • @[email protected]
    25•7 months ago

    I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

    Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

    Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.

    Motor Memory: Y <return>

    Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

    Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

    Motor Memory: Y <return>

    Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

    Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

    • @[email protected]English
      9•7 months ago

      Man, that’s a really dumb story that I find really relatable despite not having had any experiences like that. It feels like it’d be very in character for me though. Thanks for sharing, it helps me feel less silly in the various times where I’ve messed up (of which I am struggling to recall specific examples, but whatever brain part is responsible for embarrassment can remember, apparently)