this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024

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Tinkering and Stability (lemm.ee)

submitted 14 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

What are some of the easiest ways for a beginner to make their system untable when they start tinkering with it?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:

deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
bypassing the package manager (especially installing with curl | sudo sh)
changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”

That's the only part I disagree with. Software not updated in a long time can easily become a risk.

Everything else though, spot in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 35 minutes ago

Looking at it from that standpoint, you're onto something on that as well.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

delete everything in /tmp; you're not really using it anyways and you'll get more disk space. lol

i literally used this same logic when i merged the contents of c:\windows & c:\win32 because there were so many duplicate files and folders and i needed to recover the free space.

sometimes i'm thankful for my cluelessness; examples like this paint me into corners and this particular corner was the impetus behind my exploration into linux; which has sustained my career for the last 25ish years through several once-in-a-lifetime economic recessions and multiple personal setbacks.

linux is the best mistake i've ever made.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I'm curious what you work as? Sysadmin?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Janitor.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

i've been accused of that along with several other slurs like systems engineer and cloud operations engineer and it systems architecture analyst and software engineer. lol

i'm a software developer atm, but my current gig has a LOT of overlap with all of those other four letter word titles that i dare not repeat in decent company. lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I'm gonna guess "cuck"

[–] [email protected] 22 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Mess with grub, without really understanding what you're doing.

Also, "meep".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Anybody that claims to know what they're doing with grub is a fool or a liar.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

Go through all installed packages and remove "bloat".
Add third party repositories.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago

Removing bloat doesn’t necessarily make things unstable. I remove all the games from my KDE Plasma installs. The primary mistake that can occur in removing non-essential programs is ignoring the list of programs that this is a dependency of or also removes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Ahaha. That hurts.

Pro-Tip: Even if you don't program in Python, it might be necessary for several of your applications.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Ah yes, I've made that mistake, too.
Also, going through Synaptic and deleting everything you don't know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

Synaptic is a new Linux user's worst enemy. Makes it too easy to just break stuff.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 13 hours ago

Trying to mount an iso image in the terminal and accidentally un-mounting your root drive.

Totally didn't do that before...nope not even once, definitely not twice >.>

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

Overclocking

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago

Installing GPU drivers :). Bonus if you need to use CUDA on top of that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Mememe meme me me

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

Apparently running an update on Fedora. My flatpaks were broken on Fedora 40, so I thought it's a configuration issue on my part and did a clean reinstall when Fedora 41 came out. Issues were not present... until I ran an update.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Just my experience, I was unable to log in after trying to add samba to my installation. Had to boot into live usb and reset my password.

Maube I'm just bad and it's not samba.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Not sure if this is what happend, but there is a sync option in samba where you can sync your samba user password with login user password.

However this needs explicitly be stated in the samba.conf and needs some further configuration. It could be possible that the installation fuckedup something with passwd.

Just guessing here, I played a bit arround with samba and password syncing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

My thought as well. Maybe sync was in default configuration or I just copy pasted it without reading.

Long story short, I have no idea if system user passwords and sama user passwords are the same thing, how to set them up (if they are not the same), or how to make samba use same user accounts and passwords (so that I don't have to remember one more password). So I just gave up.

I was trying to do everything according to arch wiki, but either samba is overcomplicated for no reason, or the article is just not written well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Instability you ask? This is like a slow creep to instability and freeze your system. It's called the Bash Fork Bomb (look it up if you want), but it's a copy/paste you put in and it slows your system down by consuming all the system resources and cause it to lock up HARD. It goes away after a system reboot, though.

I was going to post the code here, but decided to play nice. But if you are curious:

https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/

(edit: Made 'slow' 'slows')

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

Recompile your kernel whilst drunk

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

sudo rm -rf /boot /efi

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

It's far more dangerous to run it without a space between the - and rf

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

fuck, stupid mobile