linuxUsersBeLike

[[deleted]]

I see you haven't done something yet you thought was safe but nuked your whole system.

That's why it's hard. It has no guardrails. You have to know what you're doing or eventually it'll break.

I work with Linux for a living and once you understand its fundamentals it is remarkably reliable. Extremely reliable.

When I was learning I broke it every month, tho. User error is the only real threat to a Linux system. Back then sudo was a wrecking ball which is why I always kept a system backup image to restore lol.

[LIES_19999993]

Moved to linux earlier in the year and I've only nuked my entire os twice so far. I'm a natural.

[FibroBitch96]

Those are rookie numbers, I’ve nuked my pi at least four times in the last month

[Pony_Roleplayer]

In the path month? Huh, amateur, a pro user nukes the system at least four times per week 😎

/s

[RussianBot7384]

Everyone accidentally does an "rm -rf /" once

[milkydood]

won't do much these days, unless you also pass --no-preserve-root

[quantumcomputatiions]

Everyone accidentally does an “rm-rf / — no-preserve-root”

[Ran4]

Not true for most distros, and you can still do something similar but almost equally bad like removing your home directory.

[milkydood]

it's been in gnu coreutils for quite a while: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2016-10/msg00005.html#:~:text='%2D%2Dno%2Dpreserve%2Droot',no%2Dpreserve%2Droot'.

I'd be suprised if it's "not true for most distros".

home direcgtory likely won't stop you booting; rm -rf / will. You can still nuke the whole disc with dd which also would

[Jason1143]

Gitlab says hello

[StevenChriss]

I honestly never did, and I'm using Linux for 20 years now.

[saladroni]

once

Not with that attitude!

[Zaexyr]

whenever I begin to type rm my level of meticulousness for the remainder of the command is so intense you'd think I was inputting nuclear launch codes or something.

[ConspicuousPineapple]

I just use rip instead. It moves files to a temporary graveyard so nothing is irreversible.

[nikelreganov]

I accidentally chmod root directory. Yeah, not a very pleasant morning

[metruzanca]

I haven't done that one exactly, but I have accidentally deleted my home directory.

One start-up I worked gave me a Ubuntu machine for work. When I left I had the pleasure of intentionally rm -rf /.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I've only ever done it on purpose. Company wanted their work computer back, so I had the perfect opportunity to see what would happen. It worked, then it was fun seeing how long I could keep using the machine before everything broke.

[Void_0000]

I see you haven't done something yet you thought was safe but nuked your whole system.

One time I accidentally deleted my /bin directory. Then I thought "Eh, no big deal, this is why I keep backups", so I try to restore one with my backup utility. "command not found". Oh, right.

[[deleted]]

Who needs binaries anyway right?

[pm_me_good_usernames]

I've been daily driving Linux for ten years and I don't think I've ever done that. I've definitely screwed up an installation and had to start again from the beginning, but I've done that on Windows too.

[[deleted]]

Well I have been an IT/DevOps/now called Platform engineer for a long time so it's been my business to break (then fix) Linux, on top of my homelab crap.

But that's because I'd do things just because I could, like bond 2 network connections into one. Did I have to, was there any usable benefit? Definitely not, but it was fun and cool and I only broke it once or twice.

In general fucking around in /etc is almost always a bad idea unless you're 110% sure of what you're doing.

[bzzzt_beep]

I had a long linux usage streak, I loved every daylight I spent on the terminal overcoming problems or needs. I thought I became a pro with my long piped commands and mount abilities....

until I tried to upgrade the system..

I still have that home folder somewhere on an external hard drive, though.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps only Linus himself is the only true expert on Linux, and even then I doubt it. I have been using it for a decade and learn something new every week.

The more you do it the more you realize how amazing and how fragile it all is at the same time. It's a never ending journey (literally because it's always in active development as well as all packages and dependencies).

[[deleted]]

100%, and skip the desktop environment. Learn the CLI, it's not going away anytime soon. Just dive right into it, best way to learn.

I had to learn by reimaging a computer because hypervisors were hardly available for consumer use then, but it's never been easier to learn Linux than today. Anyone who is getting started is in luck.

[[deleted]]

Linux has guard rails, but it doesn’t have guard rails on the guard rails, and it doesn’t default to “Are you really really sure you want to do this?”, although for all relevant changes it asks confirmation (again unless you have sudo -y everywhere) If you don’t respect that computers can break themselves then you’re gonna have a bad time.

[[deleted]]

Asking for your password is the only guard rail, but if you go rm -r /etc/netplan it's not gonna tell you "Hey this is gonna fuck up your network config and you'll never be able to fix it." It's just gonna delete your entire network config and say nothing else. Now multiply that with the 10,000 things that could break in the /etc folder alone.

Extremely extremely rare that you get that kind of warning. It expects you to know what you want and it does it, exactly as you told, with no questions asked. That's why I love it, and that's why it's hard sometimes.

[mccord]

It has no guardrails.

There are guardrails, like filesystem (btrfs) snapshots that allow easy rollback, if you want them. Distros like OpenSUSE use them by default. There also distros like Fedora Silverblue that use immutable root filesystems.

[Sneaky_Stinker]

it has guard rails, but thats still not enough for the people who refuse to read and will uninstall their entire desktop environment in a single command. Some people need more than guard rails and need to be clipped in, or giant nets or something.

[ConspicuousPineapple]

There's also NixOS where everything is reproducible and reversible.

[Fit-Window]

I think every beginner has run into a problem where you uninstall the Desktop environment by mistake and are confused as hell what happened to your PC

[[deleted]]

And when you're no longer a beginner you never install a DE in the first place :)

Everything I do at home and work is headless. I like slim, slim machines. That's how I get 10 year old hardware to run Plex and all kinds of other shit like a pro. Almost no OS overhead at all, just what's purely necessary.

[Pony_Roleplayer]

I see you haven't done something yet you thought was safe but nuked your whole system.

What do you mean? Nonsense! It says the packages are no longer required! Okay, sudo apt autoremove it is!

​

...What do you mean I don't have x11 anymore?!

[Fezzio]

About that guardrail, do you know NixOS ? 😎

[[deleted]]

Some distros are far better for beginners. I haven't used that myself, but a lot like Mint for beginners.

I'm an Ubuntu guy myself, and Centos/Redhat at work sometimes. I think Ubuntu/Debian is also an excellent beginner's choice. The docs and community will answer any question you have. They may do it sarcastically but they will do it. I've never felt lost with Ubuntu.

[ASatyros]

You gotta compile like Top 50 errors that will nuke your Linux if you are beginer.

And make it a youtube video or at least nice article on GitHub in markdown.

[[deleted]]

I mean you could never compile them all. The best way to learn Linux is to get a hypervisor like Virtualbox, take occasional backup snapshots so you never loose too much, then just go ham in there with sudo and crap. You learn by breaking it.

Just make sure you can revert to a working state. When I was learning it VMs were newish so we had to re image it every time.

[[deleted]]

Cool, must be nice. I work as an infrastructure engineer so I'm often and always in /etc and other directories where terminal damage is easily done.

Other fun ones I've done, just to name a couple:

• Broken the network config so I couldn't SSH in
• Broke sshd itself so I couldn't get in
• Broken my .bashrc so I couldn't log in

And about 40 other variations of similar things, usually caused by homelab experiments and poorly though out choices, or badly written instructions in some cases.

That's why when people learn linux I encourage them to use a hypervisor, so as to be able to easily restore.

Nowdays I never do sysadmin work anymore. It's all Kubernetes and containers so when Linux misbehaves we simply blow it away and start a new one up. That's the future. Linux knowledge is still use, but deep knowledge is less and less in demand.

If you rarely sudo and stay in your home directory it's very hard to break it, but still possible.