Do literally anything but use foolproof desktop apps in a system that cannot revert to a known state.

When you try to run a thing that everyone assures you now works on Linux flawlessly but for some reason it does not work for you in particular so you dwell deep into troubleshooting and try everything possible until you break something but then you figure out how to make it work without breaking your system so you re-install OS and start again for it to just suddenly work without the workaround just so you stumble on the same scenario with another program.

Moving some packages (especially libraries) onto an unstable branch while keeping others back on a stable one. It probably won’t fuck you immediately, but when it does it’ll be a bastard to diagnose because you will have forgotten what you did.

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”

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.