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.