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.
I updated a manjaro system.
Did you… Kill-a-manjaro?
I rebooted PC in the middle of Manjaro update. Apparently, kernel was updating, so it broke.
Took me 15mins to restore, but they could make some safeguards.
Other than that, never faced issues updating Manjaro.
Well, there’s a reason why Windows says “Don’t turn off your computer” during updates. I think noob-friendly Linux distros should implement a similar system, where Kernel updates are only installed on shutdown and a message is displayed telling the user not to shut down their computer. There should still be rescue mechanisms like Btrfs snapshots or a recovery system that automatically detects a broken kernel and reinstalls it.
I think it can be done even simpler - no need for a special screen, just make notification and don’t turn off while the kernel is updating.
I moved from Manjaro after a couple system updates just borked something like X11, but those happened over a 3 year course of using Manjaro.
As insightful as it is to find the root cause of a Linux problem like that, on my main system it was just not something I wanted to deal with or risk having right when I need the PC.
I see. Thanks for sharing your experience! What do you use now?
I moved from Manjaro to EndeavourOS and was been pretty happy with that. Unfortunately my study mandates things like .docx files, Visio drawings, things that just are more clunky to do if I’m trying to do it under Linux, so I’ve been actually using Windows 10 on my daily driver.
However I have LMDE on a second machine which I have been pretty happy with, although I am more of an Xfce guy than Cinnamon.
Thanks! Speaking of .docx files, I never actually encountered the issues with them on Linux. The only issue being macros not working great, so maybe that’s your case.
I can usually read them, though issues can range entirely from nothing to entirely broken. I otherwise haven’t tried creating a .docx file on Linux (I would usually use .odf instead) and seeing how it renders in MS Office, but when it comes to an assessment I’d prefer not to test that.
I see!