How broken are we talking here? Like, installation is kinda borked but technically works broken, or purge it with fire and salt the storage medium broken?

I have often busted my machine learning rig as it runs an ancient (but spacious VRAM) GPU. If I upgrade the drivers by accident, it takes an average of 1-2 days to make everything happy again.

I used to be more cavalier with my boot partitions; I am no stranger to a busy box for repairs. Best moments are when I used to try and adjust a live partition to make more room for the swap partition (or vice versa).

I have screwed up more Raspberry PI installations than I care to count. Usually by my own hand.

I have completely broken Xwindows multiple times due to drivers, trying to go between desktop environments, and most frequently trying to get video cards to work that aren’t natively supported.

Friend, while I appreciate the time and effort on the docs, it has a rather tiny section on one of the truly worst aspects of pip (and the only one that really guts usability): package conflicts.

Due to the nature of Python as an interpreted language, there is little that you can check in advance via automation around “can package A and package B coexist peacefully with the lowest common denominator of package X”? Will it work? Will it fail? Run your tool/code and hope for the best!

Pip is a nightmare with larger, spawling package solutions (i.e. a lot of the ML work out there). But even with the freshest of venv creations, things still go remarkably wrong rather quick in my experience. My favorite is when someone, somewhere in the dependency tree forgets to lock their version, which ends up blossoming into a ticking time bomb before it abruptly stops working.

Hopefully, your experiences have been far more pleasant than mine.

More context: https://www.langton.cloud/python-pip-requirements-txt-lock-file/

Hahaha!..

Oh shit, you’re serious.

It’s all fun and games until the wheel variant you need for your hardware acceleration package conflicts with that esoteric math library you planned on using.

Yes. So much yes.

Sure, at least half of the FAANG use Linux. But they use a homegrown Linux flavor often maintained by an entire dedicated team. Not some random ass Ubuntu or Mint ISO you downloaded; these images are custom tailored to the workflows, dev needs, security needs, and even package management needs of the corporation. They often carry a complete profile template that integrates with whatever they’ve chosen to enforce authentication, have a lavish on-board remote monitoring system, you name it.

Ah, yes, what a nice way to be sliced into a thousand pieces at once if you trip. Even more fun if they get knocked out of their retention mode.

Is there a rubbing alcohol dispenser that sprays from the adjacent room after you go through? In case the first set of blood-curdling screams aren’t loud enough.

This is the real answer to this question. Not just an invention to unfairly evaluate folks (and charge them originally to see it!), but nothing more than a “how much we can fleece you for” score that has become so widely embraced you can’t ignore it.

Let’s not forget HP making an “update” that effectively self-destructed the printer for use if you don’t use their cartridges. Evem after the public outcry and back pedaling by the company with a new bios update, my printer still “manifested” the same problem they intentionally introduced.

Replaced parts, tried other things, then just said “forget it” and replaced it with a more expensive color laser from a competitor. Happiness and reliable printing ensued.