I tried to use dd with too much hubris once. I had to restore from backups (which ironically, I had made with dd). I’m usually overly cautious, but I was in a hurry.

as a kid, when i was learning linux it was slackware on a massive stack of floppies. and this was before plug and play mind you, there were all sorts of things DOS did one way but linux expected another way.

Well i only had the one computer. So you would get so far through a linux install (many hours, overnight was common) and run into a real issue such as how do i properly terminate the scsi chains differently than dos expected so i could get it to see the discs, or what jumpers did you have to move around to free up IRQ’s so that linux could see the modem. Sometimes i just messed something up and oops start over.

well if the hastily printed docs i had amassed didn’t cover it, no choice but to re install dos and telemate and hope for help on usenet. which always did come. then you print that and cross your fingers and hope it worked.

I don’t recall exactly how long it took me to get slackware on that old family 286 but the joy when i finally had it all working.

then i learned linux had no dialup scripts yet for slip/ppp yet so i had to reinstall dos to go learn bash so i could teach the thing how to connect to my isp, since it was a little different for all of them at that time.

as an autistic kid this was my secondary special interest and i loved every second of all of this. it ultimately gives you a fearlessness. all this stuff as a kid prepared me for a fruitful if frustrating career as a full stack software engineer.

So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn’t get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?

I think I’m past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I’ve never had to use it.

Both, to the point it doesn’t boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it’s easier to jist start over.

Uhm, zero? With ten years of using Linux? What did you do to fuck up the damn kernel? o_O

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

I think we are using linux very differently. Mine is two and one of those was a dead ssd.

I’ve never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.

Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation… And couldn’t figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.

Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.

I haven’t majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao

Unbootable systems in the dozens. I think I’ve only fucked up the kernel itself a few times. But grub or other bootloader tons, desktop environment tons, and getting into states so broken the only readily available option was reinstall, dozens. Thankfully most of these were right after a fresh install. For example dual booting just doesn’t work right for some OS installers and grub fails. Manjaro bricked itself after an update. Etc. etc.

Recently I accidently deleted the contents of /boot/ on my first arch install. The lesson that followed was something I would have rather saved for later ^^

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.

I learned by a lot of distro hopping, tweaking and tuning and compiling kernels (way back when tho), to not being afraid of “breaking things.” Since Nov. 1992. It helps when you use a spare PC or laptop though, no panic about loss

I remember managing to install two DE one above the other, and having them, somehow working at the exact same time. That was trippy.

I didn’t even know how I did it. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t replicate that on purpose.