For me it is not recording credentials with the assumption I would simply remember them later, while having every opportunity to archive them before eventually forgetting. Also, not keeping detailed enough notes & photos of exactly how my hardware is attached.
I tried to enroll secure boot without understanding what I’m doing. I locked myself out of the motherboard.
Also when you accidentally create a directory called ‘~’ the command
rm -r ~is not the right one…Also when you accidentally create a directory called ‘~’ the command
rm -r ~is not the right one…Ughh ! That one is nasty !
I feel like you can be a long time linux user and muscle memory can get you with the
rm -rf ~…
Hibernating my computer and then forgetting about it and booting into a different OS (Fedora Silverblue) on the same partition (BTRFS subvolume stuff). AND THEN TRYING TO RESUME THE HIBERNATED OS (Arch btw).
my filesystem was pretty much unrecoverable and it was my fault
My theory for what happened is:
There might have been some delayed writes on Arch, but that’s no the main issue.
When booting into Fedora and running an update, the state of the filesystem changed to the point that when resuming Arch, it put the filesystem into an extremely inconsistent state (where the Arch system might have cached (meta)data that was changed since hibernation).
Also, to clarify, I still managed to recover my data, but the FS was not mountable and btrfsck couldn’t do shit. And I’m still using that Arch install to this day. XDDD
Good to know
Encrypting a drive with Linux, then encrypting a VM within Linux with my Bitcoin wallet information in it, which I was gifted 5 bitcoin before it was popular and just forgot about it. I was 13 at the time and didn’t know what I was doing. Lost all my passwords, or I might have even just wiped my entire drive. Got a pile of hard drives to go through and see which one has Linux on it, but that’s only the first step.
Bluetooth didn’t work on my laptop. Got new bluetooth card (exact same type). Bluetooth still didn’t work.
Turns out:
- The specific card doesn’t support Linux.
- My laptop has a hardware whitelist in the BIOS that prevents me from installing any other card.
- My headphones don’t support USB bluetooth.
Hardware whitelist is unholy
Me, finding out this exists after buying a used sff HP pc and wondering why it won’t display out to any new monitor unless I unplug and plug the power cord: 💀
Luckily (or not so luckily), I was able to turn off the HP “security feature” from the bios. The pc came from a former school fleet of sff pcs
distrohopping. timewaster.
When installing arch, I wanted to kill my old drive. So 2 times in a row, I forgot to look up my drives Name, and proceeded to wipe my USB stick with /dev/random. 2 times.
Using
topgradewithout realizing what I was doing. Seemed okay for a few days until my headphones suddenly jacked to 1000 and began some sort of alarm-like buzzing. Thankfully they were not on my head, because it was so loud my gf and I thought there was some sort of fire alarm going off. This was on EndeavourOS.I tried
topgradeagain, not knowing that the app was what had done it. This time on vanilla Arch. I was not so fortunate this round and I took the sound full blast into my earholes. I reacted in milliseconds and Hulk-smash threw them halfway across the room. No lasting damage since I was so quick, but fuck me wearing headphones is more dangerous than I thought.Luckily I’ve learned from past mistakes and made Timeshift restore points before every update. I reverted to before the
topgradechanges and my distro has still been holding strong since then. I think I’ll make my own alias for full upgrade and call itupdawg.I don’t think I’ve ever lost more time than I’ve gained in knowledge from the mistakes, if that makes any sense.
Never lost any money with linux.
Not Linux, but OpenBSD. I got a sun ultra 5 for free so I decided to make a router out of it. After some research OpenBSD looked like the best option. I bought a pf book and started writing configs. After about a week I had a really nice router that did exactly what I asked it. This was back in the early days of xbox360 so getting all of the port forwarding right was kind of a pain since we had three of them connected in our apartment along with all of the computers. Then the harddrive crashed and I hadn’t made any backups. That was a lot of work down the drain.
Bought a Samsung mini laser printer and found that it is Windows only. I gave it to a neighbour.
This is a bit late since you’ve already gotten rid of it but there IS s Samsung unified Linux driver for printers.
I bought a National Instrument’s data acquisition card (PCIe-6535B) not knowing that National Instruments is not very Linux-friendly and I was not able to get it working. At least it was a used card so I did not pay to much for it, but I learned my lesson not to assume compatibility.
Once I also used ‘rm -rvf *’ from my home directory while SSH’d into a supercomputer (I made a syntax error when trying to cd into the folder that I actually wanted to delete). I was able to get my data restored from a backup, but sending that e-mail was a bit embarrassing 😆
None, using Linux never been a mistake, every mishaps is a learning process
Yep no mistake, I TOTALLY MEANT TO DO THAT !
I’m actually amazed I haven’t had any costly mistakes yet considering I’m the kind of person to say “it’s just dd, what’s the worst that can happen? it’ll be fine no worries”. Since I’ve installed Arch a year ago I’ve been constantly expecting to catastrophically break something… and my system is still running, somehow. It’s very perplexing.
You do backup important data, right?
Right… sure… erm… of course I do, obviously 😅
Actually I always mean to do it but I keep forgetting… Recently I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never remembering to do it so I’ve been trying to set up an auto-sync to my NAS with rsync and inotifywait so I won’t have to ever think about backups again… But I really suck at coding so it’s not going too well 😅
I wasted a few hours, trying to make some flatpak apps do as I wanted, before I understood how flatpaks works, and why they are not always a good solution.
Sometimes I forget why I did something and undo it. Then, when I remember, I hope I made a text file documenting what I did to begin with. If not, back to search.
