What are some of the easiest ways for a beginner to make their system untable when they start tinkering with it?

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    11·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • eldavi@lemmy.ml
        6·
        1 year ago

        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

  • HouseWolf@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    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 >.>

      • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        Pro: you have a custom kernel.

        Con: the next morning, you can have a non-functioning computer with no idea of what you did.

  • vort3@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • vort3@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • node815@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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’)

  • WereCat@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.