I deleted my desktop environment during an apt upgrade, not once, but twice. Bad habit of not actually reading the messages that pop up properly - it did ask me if I wanted to delete it all, and I just said “yea lol lfg”. There was some conflict with a third party PPA that caused this.

Didn’t know that had happened to begin with. I was stuck on the session manager login screen and it just wouldn’t proceed after entering password. First time I just reinstalled Linux, and the second time I found out how to reinstall it from tty. This is how I learned about tty as well.

Not a software one, but back when I was a teenager doing hardware modifications (or attempting to at least), I had a very valuable to me Atari 130XE computer (35 or so years ago) I wanted to solder in some extra RAM or some chip (I don’t recall now) but I had problems removing the old one so I called up my friend who did electronics repair the Mainboard. It was raining that night I took it to him so I did what I thought was best. Put it in a black garbage bag to protect it. Lets just say the next morning is when I found out that Static + circuit boards is a bad thing. Never more than a valuable less for me than at that time. He was a good friend though and out of the goodness of his heart, he gave me a replacement one so I wouldn’t be without. (Mind you, these were out of production and considered obsolete at the time maybe worth $40 at the time) and not yet vintage as they would be seen today where in some markets can fetch upward to a few hundred more as is.

I think I posted this before in some other thread, but one time back when I used to use Ubuntu, I opened my laptop and the screen was upside-down. Everything worked perfectly, but just upside-down. I went through every display setting I could find, trawled through forums for hours (on a different, non upside-down computer) and got absolutely nowhere. It was at the point where I was thinking I’ll probably have to reformat and start over and this will forever be a mystery.

Then I accidentally solved it when my Playstation controller battery got low and I plugged it into the nearest USB port to charge, which was my laptop. As soon as I plugged it it, the screen flipped back the right way. As it turned out, Ubuntu was talking to the controller and had for some reason interpreted the gyroscope movement as ‘rotate screen’ the last time I charged it. After a couple of minutes of waving the controller around and watching the desktop spin while going “huh”, I just unplugged it when it the right way round and crisis averted!

One time while streaming I had someone convince me to install zsh. Almost bricked the thing live. No clue what I was doing that day.

Just the other day I tried to remove pipewire from my system but didn’t look at the list of packages to be removed… Turns out it removed gnome desktop and so booted into CLI 🤦‍♀️

I wanted to reinstall my Gentoo system. A SUSE (back before OpenSUSE) disc was the newest distro I had lying around. I thought it shouldn’t matter from which system I do the install, Gentoo won’t care.

So I repartitioned /dev/hda, installed the base system and went to set up my mount points. Only to discover that my data drive was gone. Stupid SUSE labeled the drives differently. /dev/hdb was my old system drive and I had repartitioned my old data drive.

Taught me to really check which drive was which. I wouldn’t touch SUSE again for decades because of this.

I made alias q=exit for some reason and now I accidentally close the terminal when I press ;q and enter 😭

Short: I forgot the /etc/fstab mount entry

I’m not sure if the following counts as stupid, but here is one where I almost wiped my system and reinstalled everything. I have some entries in the /etc/fstab to bind certain directories to specific locations in my home, to keep it modular (doing this since over 10 years). One day I replaced one of the internal harddrives and then the system would no longer boot up, because the it tries to mount a non existent drive.

Due to my long years of experience and wisdom with Linux, I thought that either the new drive was broken or I something from my body sparked over the board. It took me several minutes until I realized what actually happened and then everything was fine.

BTW in EndeavourOS when this happens again (and it did) then while boot the system asks me to ignore that entry and continue. Which is soooo useful and don’t know why this was never asked before (before I was on EndeavourOS).

I set up a cron task and it was meant to do a super scuffed sendmail if there was a problem, there was about 20GB on the spool before I noticed and the pi’s SD card was full