Linux

Man, this was a few months back. I’ve got fedora asahi Linux (Linux on an ARM Mac) and I was trying to install Pycharm to play a bit with Python. Unfortunately, they did not have it packaged for arm, so I had to download a pre compiled tar or zip folder. I test it, see that it is an assortment of bin folders and alike, and decide to put it all elsewhere so it wouldn’t get lost. So I put it on the root and merge the folders. I think immediately “wait this is stupid” and decide to get Pycharm out of there. (I was on nautilus with root privileges), so i simply Ctrl-Z outa there. It shows a warning whether I wanted to delete 4000 files, but because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise what rhay meant. So I did it. I then continue on with my life, and find myself unable to open apps. I was fairly confused, as the apps I already had open still worked. I decide to try to restart the laptop. It is when I see that there is no restart button anymore that I realise what I did, and I just think to myself. I’ll be dammed if this survives a restart, im already screwed so it doesn’t matter. (It didn’t survive the reboot, had to install from scratch. At least an excuse to use the K desktop environment)

sudo usermod -a cdrom

Forgot the -G and wasn't sudo anymore...

I did recover eventually, but it was not nice.

For me, it was a simple enabling of AUR im manjaro, twice Now I use arch, lol.

Don't get me started.

There are good reasons why I have personal "production system" to do my work with.

Built a new desktop, backed up everything on my old laptop, next step was to format an Arch installer USB. Instead of formatting the USB, I formatted my laptop's /boot partition. No big loss since I had the backup and was done with that old toaster, but oops.

Years ago a friend mistakenly typed in killall5 as root on a remote server. Didn't break things but resulted in extra work and effort.

@fl42v I have thousands from my early days, but my only recent-ish one was pretty funny.

On an Arch install that hadn't been updated for a while, in a rush, had an app that needed OpenSSL 3. Instead of updating the whole system, I just updated the openssl package.

*Everything* broke immediately. Turns out a lot of stuff depends on openssl. Who knew?

To fix, booted to the arch installer, chrooted into my env, and reverted to the previous version of the package — then updated properly.

It was only in a container on a Chromebook, but I'll share it anyway. One time, I had installed Android Studio but found it mildly annoying that I got a line when using apt about Android Studio and some error on a certain line of this one file. I believe the file was something related to dpkg, and after changing some things within the file, I seemed to have broken apt. Luckily, I had a backup, but it was a few days old, so I had to reinstall some apps.

sudo apt remove python3

Thinking I would install a more recent version. 😂

Debian sid a few years ago: Uninstalled Python2, system became unusable and couldn't neither reinstall from APT neither recompile it

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!

Once I succumbed to a proprietary software's allure, post-usage, I felt like a digital pariah! To rid myself of the taint, I wiped my system clean – reinstall time!

I was trying to extract some files from a a Linux image of one of those ARM boards. It was packed into the cpio format, and I had never used the format before. Of course I was trying to extract to a root owned directory and I sudo'ed it. I effed up the command and overwrote all my system directories (/bin, /usr, /lib, etc...). Thankfully I had backed up my system recently and was able to get it working again.

Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[

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.

sudo rm -r /run/timeshift

About a year ago I somehow fucked up installing a new window manager on my tablet so badly I had to start from scratch - to this day I have no idea what happened there, but it just wouldn't boot properly or anything after that 🤷 I needed it for school pretty quickly though so my top priority was getting it working again, so I set up a fresh install instead of continuing to fuck around.

Not the same level of destruction, but I fucked up my first ever install a couple months in trying to resolve dependencies related to python and wine, which is why I'm more interested in sandboxing whenever feasible these days. After only two months I guess I had been fucking around with linux long enough to have a little too much unearned confidence, lol

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 cant remember anymore... Let me explain ... My first computer was with at-the-time-very-new windows xp, using primary for games, after some time it got bloated with stuff so i had to reinstall again and again over time. Then i discovered redhat,centos and debian... I started heavily distro hopping. My passion for software grew to the point that I was installing new software on daily basis, just to explore new things. But nothing seemed stable enough, ubuntu, fedora, sabayon, gentoo, arch... And their derivatives all broke under my fingers to the point that i had to do more fixing than discovering new software, I took it as a challenge and continue. At around the time of university I discovered NixOS, as with any new technology I went head on with it. It took a lot of trial and error since at the time there were no documentation for any of it. I spent months reading the code, but I never gave up, since what I have found was a gem. I found the OS that is resistant to my curiosity, I just cant seem to be able to break it. Now I use NixOS everywhere that I can, even on my work computer. I do not need to reinstall after initial installation. Well... only when hardware fails...

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. :]

I've literally done the rm -rf / thing. I thought I was in a different subdirectory, but I was in / and did rm -rf .

When it didn't return after half a second, I looked at the command again and hit CTRL+C about 20 times in the span of 3 seconds.

I had to rebuild the install, but luckily didn't lose anything in /home.

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 was running Fedora. Something like 27 or so. I needed drivers. I don't remember if it was AMD or Nvidia, but they were only available on RedHat.

So I downloaded the RedHat drivers for the GPU and forced it to install. It worked! It was great.

Then when I updated the distro to the next release... everything failed. It was dropping into grub, but no video was output. Ooof.

So I ended up enabling a terminal console and connecting to it via a serial port to debug. I had to completely uninstall that RPM and I was never happy that it was properly gone. So a few months later I ended up reinstalling the whole OS.

On the plus side, I learned a lot about grub and serial consoles. Worth it.

I've had the typical disasters with partition tables and boot loader mixups, but the one I keep coming back to is updating my Nvidia drivers too eagerly. Whether something gets messed up with an external monitor, or the laptop starts resisting switching away from the integrated GPU, or an electron app I use regularly that makes heavy use of 3D acceleration breaks, or I just need to bump the driver version in a reproducible system state record... it's just bad news.

I was testing a custom initramfs that would load a full root into a ramdisk, and when I was going to shut down I tried to run rm -rf --no-preserve-root / to see what would happen, since I was on a ramdisk anyway. The computer would not boot after that because it nuked the UEFI options.

I deleted the entire taskbar.

I'm not sure how funny this will be, but here's how I broke my system twice in a single case. Step by step:

1. Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
2. After a few updates, there was a problem with Plasma. Applications were not starting from the panels or the .desktop files (they worked from the terminal. The terminal emulator was in startup and worked that way)
3. After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded... Worked for a while
4. While using pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause a pacman warning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1
5. To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using pacman -Ql and cp to copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way with pacman and chroot didn't work because glibc is needed by bash).
6. Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn't checked the intermediate output from pacman -Ql, which was telling cp to copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn't given the -r to cp) BREAK 2

In the end, I just made a new installation, this time with a new home and hand-picked whatever settings I wanted from the previous home, Viva la multi-HDD

Actually, I have a story that I'd consider an achievement even though it was extremely stupid and by all accounts should've bricked the system but didnt.

So I was on windows and wanted to install linux as a dual-boot on the main drive. The problem was that my mobo didnt like this particular and the only flash drive I've had, dropping it out mid-boot, before I got any usable terminal, so a usual install method wasn't an option. So I had this crazy idea to start a vmware vm in windows and pass the linux iso and the boot drive directly to it and try to install it live over the running system. Unfortunately, vmware guys thought of this and there's a check that disallows passing the boot drive to vms. So i created a bunch of .vmdks for another drive and fiddled with them in notepad until I somehow managed to trick vmware and at some point it started booting the same windows copy that I was sitting on. I quickly powered it off, added the linux iso and proceeded to install like I usually would. It did involve some partition shuffling, but, somehow, it went smoothly, linux installed, grub caught on, and even windows somehow survived, even though it was physically moved around on the disk. It serms that vmware later patched this out, because later in an attempt to re-create the trick of running the same copy of windows twice, but after updates to both windows and vmware, I was met with the same old error that boot drive is not allowed when trying to add that same virtual drive I had laying around.

I suppose it doesn't quite qualify as breaking the system in a funny or stupid way but it certainly was one of those stupid things that was easy to fix after a ton of trouble shooting, ignoring the issue for a while and trying to fix it again.

So i had an old pc where I had a failed hard drive which I replaced. Obviously I also accidentally unplugged my optical disc drive and plugged it back in. Now that failed drive was just a data drive so the system should have booted up no problem since the os was on a SSD but instead it got a kernel panic and got stuck at boot. Since it was late I left it at that and came back to that the next day where it would still not boot. So I unplugged the disc drive and looked up what it could be. Tried a ton of different possible solutions but every time I added that disc drive it would panic.

I eventually kind of gave up and just didn't use that disc drive at all and just had it as a paperweight in the system. Unplugged and all that. When my replacement SSDs for my old data drive and backup drive came in I tried again to get that optical drive working but to no avail. So I unplugged it again, got it all set up and ran into another issue where for some reason Linux couldn't properly use my backup SSD. So I investigated that as well and trough some miracle found a post on the forum from my Mainboard manufacturer... Turns out that particular Mainboard had a data retention chip on it that didn't like Linux.

So naturally I just plugged everything into the data ports that were not controlled by that chip and it all worked as intended.

Stupid dumb chip on a Mainboard, all I had to do was try the simple idea of unplugging and trying a different connector but instead I did all that other stuff first that didn't work and cost me so much of my time.

Moral of the story, when in doubt try and put stuff on different connectors and see if that fixes it. Might just be a dead connector for all you know. Or an incompatible chip on the Mainboard.

FWIW I bought that Mainboard long before I switched to Linux and didn't plan at all to switch at the time. But that's a different story.

A regular update I guess...

Not really a "braking my linux setup", but still fun as hell! Back in university, a friend of mine got a new notebook at a time... we spent the night at the university hacking and they wanted to set the notebook up in the evening. They got to the point where they had to setup luks via the cryptsetup CLI. But they got stuck, it just wouldn't work. They tried for HOURS to debug why cryptsetup didn't let them setup LUKS on the drive.

At some point, in the middle of the night (literally something like 2 in the morning) they suddenly JUMPED from their seat and screamed "TYPE UPPERCASE 'YES' - FUCK!!!"

They debugged for about six hours and the conclusion was that cryptsetup asks "If you are sure you want to overwrite, type uppercase 'yes'". ... and they typed lowercase. For six hours. Literally.

The room was on the floor, holding their stomach laughing.

Renaming a mount point while mounted was a fun experience in losing data back in the big box Redhat 5.0 days.

Before I understood how to properly build and test mesa (graphics driver), I compiled it and then procedeed to manually symlink the files in the lib and lib32 directories. When I pressed enter on that ln command, the UI immediately crashed and X would no longer start after rebooting the computer. Reinstalling mesa from a virtual terminal wouldn't fix it so I just reinstalled the system. Good times :)

Somehow I found ways to remove and break the GUI multiple times in multiple ways in multiple distros.

Different scenarios, different times, different issues trying to "fix". My usual fix after this was always to copy what I think I still had important and then move on with a reinstall.

Recently I have been playing with ZorinOS and broke it in the same way by fidgeting with pipewire. Distro hoped to Fedora Silverblue due to the immutable filesystem. I wonder if I will break this one in a way I cannot revert it easily with rpm-ostree. I almost feel challenged.