Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?

  • xavier666@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Me: I want to change my car tire

    Car: Hey, your car is going at 60 mph now. Do you want to change your tire now?

    Me: Is it not possible?

    Car: It’s your car, anything is possible with enough effort. As per Google one guy managed to change a tire of a bullock cart while it was moving at 2 mph.

    Me: Sounds good. Let’s gooo!

    This is the experience for Linux tinkerers.

    • quantumfoam@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      In my case it was:

      Me: I want to change my car tire, and i naturally assume we are parked safely in the garage. This is a routine maintenance thing after all.

      Car: Sure thing! bork

      Me: Umm, why are wrapped around a tree?

      Car: Well, we were currently going 60mph, and we posted about it on this website.

      Me: Why is there no warning that tells me that doing maintenance now will crash my car?

      Car: Well like i said, there is, and it is on this website you should have gone to.

      • xavier666@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        and we posted about it on this website.

        In my personal experience, these sort of things happen rarely, unless you are using some sort of rolling-release distribution. For all my mission-critical docker apps, I wait for at least a week after a major update has been pushed and check the dev website.