What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?
I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.
I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:
$ rm -rf ./bin
As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.
You know, the war stories.
Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.
Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.
The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?
It turns out that
lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_homedoesn't reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.
Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don't do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.
I was confused cause I remember reading this exact comment... I wondered if my brain is starting to fail and hallucinate...
But no, you did post the same story 5 months ago :'D
Oh no, I've been caught, haha. Good memory!
To my defense, the story seemed relevant to OP's question, and the post that it was originally in has been deleted, apparently.