What are some of the easiest ways for a beginner to make their system untable when they start tinkering with it?
Mess with grub, without really understanding what you’re doing.
Also, “meep”.
once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:
- deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
- switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
- playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
- bypassing the package manager (especially installing with
curl | sudo sh) - changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
- changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
That’s the only part I disagree with. Software not updated in a long time can easily become a risk.
Everything else though, spot in.
aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”
Go through all installed packages and remove “bloat”.
Add third party repositories.
Ahaha. That hurts.
Pro-Tip: Even if you don’t program in Python, it might be necessary for several of your applications.
Ah yes, I’ve made that mistake, too.
Also, going through Synaptic and deleting everything you don’t know.
New linux user goes online to find out how to list installed packages in the terminal. Starts removing the ones they don’t recognise.
Removing bloat doesn’t necessarily make things unstable. I remove all the games from my KDE Plasma installs. The primary mistake that can occur in removing non-essential programs is ignoring the list of programs that this is a dependency of or also removes.
delete everything in /tmp; you’re not really using it anyways and you’ll get more disk space. lol
i literally used this same logic when i merged the contents of c:\windows & c:\win32 because there were so many duplicate files and folders and i needed to recover the free space.
sometimes i’m thankful for my cluelessness; examples like this paint me into corners and this particular corner was the impetus behind my exploration into linux; which has sustained my career for the last 25ish years through several once-in-a-lifetime economic recessions and multiple personal setbacks.
linux is the best mistake i’ve ever made.
i’ve been accused of that along with several other slurs like systems engineer and cloud operations engineer and it systems architecture analyst and software engineer. lol
i’m a software developer atm, but my current gig has a LOT of overlap with all of those other four letter word titles that i dare not repeat in decent company. lol
Trying to mount an iso image in the terminal and accidentally un-mounting your root drive.
Totally didn’t do that before…nope not even once, definitely not twice >.>
