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.

  • c10r0x@lemmy.world
    41·
    3 hours ago

    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.

    • ackzsel@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      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.

  • fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    101·
    22 hours ago

    Hibernating my computer and then forgetting about it and booting into a different OS (Fedora Silverblue) on the same partition (BTRFS subvolume stuff). AND THEN TRYING TO RESUME THE HIBERNATED OS (Arch btw).

    my filesystem was pretty much unrecoverable and it was my fault

    • fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      51·
      22 hours ago

      My theory for what happened is:

      There might have been some delayed writes on Arch, but that’s no the main issue.

      When booting into Fedora and running an update, the state of the filesystem changed to the point that when resuming Arch, it put the filesystem into an extremely inconsistent state (where the Arch system might have cached (meta)data that was changed since hibernation).

      Also, to clarify, I still managed to recover my data, but the FS was not mountable and btrfsck couldn’t do shit. And I’m still using that Arch install to this day. XDDD

  • Luffy@lemmy.ml
    8·
    22 hours ago

    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.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
    6·
    22 hours ago

    Bought a Samsung mini laser printer and found that it is Windows only. I gave it to a neighbour.

  • steeznson@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 day ago

    I don’t think I’ve ever lost more time than I’ve gained in knowledge from the mistakes, if that makes any sense.

    Never lost any money with linux.

  • responsible_sith@programming.dev
    22·
    1 day ago

    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…

    • shynoise@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 day ago

      I feel like you can be a long time linux user and muscle memory can get you with the rm -rf ~…

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      11·
      1 day ago

      Also when you accidentally create a directory called ‘~’ the command rm -r ~ is not the right one…

      Ughh ! That one is nasty !

  • swelter_spark@reddthat.comEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    Sometimes I forget why I did something and undo it. Then, when I remember, I hope I made a text file documenting what I did to begin with. If not, back to search.

  • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    Using topgrade without realizing what I was doing. Seemed okay for a few days until my headphones suddenly jacked to 1000 and began some sort of alarm-like buzzing. Thankfully they were not on my head, because it was so loud my gf and I thought there was some sort of fire alarm going off. This was on EndeavourOS.

    I tried topgrade again, not knowing that the app was what had done it. This time on vanilla Arch. I was not so fortunate this round and I took the sound full blast into my earholes. I reacted in milliseconds and Hulk-smash threw them halfway across the room. No lasting damage since I was so quick, but fuck me wearing headphones is more dangerous than I thought.

    Luckily I’ve learned from past mistakes and made Timeshift restore points before every update. I reverted to before the topgrade changes and my distro has still been holding strong since then. I think I’ll make my own alias for full upgrade and call it updawg.

  • A7thStone@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 day ago

    Not Linux, but OpenBSD. I got a sun ultra 5 for free so I decided to make a router out of it. After some research OpenBSD looked like the best option. I bought a pf book and started writing configs. After about a week I had a really nice router that did exactly what I asked it. This was back in the early days of xbox360 so getting all of the port forwarding right was kind of a pain since we had three of them connected in our apartment along with all of the computers. Then the harddrive crashed and I hadn’t made any backups. That was a lot of work down the drain.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    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.

      • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        7 hours ago

        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 😅

  • Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml
    15·
    2 days ago

    Bluetooth didn’t work on my laptop. Got new bluetooth card (exact same type). Bluetooth still didn’t work.

    Turns out:

    1. The specific card doesn’t support Linux.
    2. My laptop has a hardware whitelist in the BIOS that prevents me from installing any other card.
    3. My headphones don’t support USB bluetooth.
      • BlindFrog@lemmy.world
        12·
        1 day ago

        Me, finding out this exists after buying a used sff HP pc and wondering why it won’t display out to any new monitor unless I unplug and plug the power cord: 💀

        Luckily (or not so luckily), I was able to turn off the HP “security feature” from the bios. The pc came from a former school fleet of sff pcs

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    DE hopping/Switching to a new Distro without testing it in a VM

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      19·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • TerHu@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      i love the raspberry pi imager for that reason. i don’t want no balena etcher stealing my data, but a gui is very convenient for flashing isos, so raspi imager it is! (works for any iso you want)