Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
It’s not like you can’t shoot yourself in the foot while using windows (not sure about macs, tho, but likely just as well). I remember breaking windows countless times while figuring out what service crap can be disabled, removing edge or defender, yada yada.
On the contrary, in my experience, if you’re not actively messing with linux, it’s overall more stable than windows. Like I had to install windows on an actual machine a short while ago, and it was a clusterheck. Drivers failed to auto install (touchpad/trackpoint drivers, for Chaos’s sake), random bsod after an hour or so of normal use, etc. As for linux breaking on itself, I remember like 3 times that happened with me in my ~5 yrs of daily driving different distros, and 2 of those were fixable by switching to a tty (the 3rd didn’t boot, as far as I remember, due to some incompatibility between bedrock and arch).
A system update broke a dependency for libre Sprite, which hasn’t had an update in like two years. You can say they should but let’s be real, my apps shouldn’t break with an update. One of my laptop needs was portable graphics creation. This broke one of my major use cases. Yay.
Some Windows updates completely break the whole system. It’s not unique to Linux based systems.