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.
So there’s the time I converted my partition table from MBR to GPT and it corrupted everything on it so I had to reinstall. Took this opportunity to switch from Mint to Arch, something I’d been thinking of doing for a while.
Once on Arch, I had much more opportunities to make epic mistakes: For example not putting enough room on my root partition (home was on a separate one), so after a while I had to reinstall.