For me it is not recording credentials with the assumption I would simply remember them later, while having every opportunity to archive them before eventually forgetting. Also, not keeping detailed enough notes & photos of exactly how my hardware is attached.
Encrypting a drive with Linux, then encrypting a VM within Linux with my Bitcoin wallet information in it, which I was gifted 5 bitcoin before it was popular and just forgot about it. I was 13 at the time and didn’t know what I was doing. Lost all my passwords, or I might have even just wiped my entire drive. Got a pile of hard drives to go through and see which one has Linux on it, but that’s only the first step.
When installing arch, I wanted to kill my old drive. So 2 times in a row, I forgot to look up my drives Name, and proceeded to wipe my USB stick with /dev/random. 2 times.
It always involves
sudo rm -rf *
In my case it didn’t even need sudo to ruin my day. I wanted to delete a temporary directory in home by typing
rm -r ~/ tmp. See how a space snuck in between the slash and tmp? Yeah, great day that was.
I tried to enroll secure boot without understanding what I’m doing. I locked myself out of the motherboard.
Also when you accidentally create a directory called ‘~’ the command
rm -r ~is not the right one…Bluetooth didn’t work on my laptop. Got new bluetooth card (exact same type). Bluetooth still didn’t work.
Turns out:
- The specific card doesn’t support Linux.
- My laptop has a hardware whitelist in the BIOS that prevents me from installing any other card.
- My headphones don’t support USB bluetooth.
Hardware whitelist is unholy
When I first installed linux I set up a dualboot because I still had data on windows. A week passes, I get cocky, I customize the grub loader, somehow nuked the windows install in the process because (unbeknownst to me, I was installing a new bootloader on the linux drive) I ran some commands off the stack exchange. When I went to my windows drive the C part was gone-gone, I had documents on that C drive. Said to myslef “I guess I have a free drive now” and never looked back.
Those documents were important, no backups. Time, nerves and money consuming to get them again.
Spending money on a crowdfunded Linux device.
Fuck you fxtec
I got burned by them too. Still never got a Pro1x or my money back.
My payroll company came out with a be version that won’t work in Linux. They wouldn’t accommodate me and I was too deep into their ecosystem to change companies so I ended up having to buy a Windows license so I could run a virtual machine every time I had to do payroll.
Edit: My mistake was getting too dependent on a company that doesn’t care about Linux users.
I’m actually amazed I haven’t had any costly mistakes yet considering I’m the kind of person to say “it’s just dd, what’s the worst that can happen? it’ll be fine no worries”. Since I’ve installed Arch a year ago I’ve been constantly expecting to catastrophically break something… and my system is still running, somehow. It’s very perplexing.
You do backup important data, right?
Right… sure… erm… of course I do, obviously 😅
Actually I always mean to do it but I keep forgetting… Recently I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never remembering to do it so I’ve been trying to set up an auto-sync to my NAS with rsync and inotifywait so I won’t have to ever think about backups again… But I really suck at coding so it’s not going too well 😅
dd if=fedora.iso of=my ssd instead of flash drive :’(
Now you know why it’s called the Disk Destroyer.
Before using dd, I prefer to run lsblk first so that I can see what each disk is called. Before pressing enter, I also double check the names with the lsblk output.
TIL about using
lsblkinstead of just reading through the output ofjournalctlto find the disk and partitions. Thanks!
