Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
Me: I want to change my car tire
Car: Hey, your car is going at 60 mph now. Do you want to change your tire now?
Me: Is it not possible?
Car: It’s your car, anything is possible with enough effort. As per Google one guy managed to change a tire of a bullock cart while it was moving at 2 mph.
Me: Sounds good. Let’s gooo!
This is the experience for Linux tinkerers.
In my case it was:
Me: I want to change my car tire, and i naturally assume we are parked safely in the garage. This is a routine maintenance thing after all.
Car: Sure thing! bork
Me: Umm, why are wrapped around a tree?
Car: Well, we were currently going 60mph, and we posted about it on this website.
Me: Why is there no warning that tells me that doing maintenance now will crash my car?
Car: Well like i said, there is, and it is on this website you should have gone to.
In my personal experience, these sort of things happen rarely, unless you are using some sort of rolling-release distribution. For all my mission-critical docker apps, I wait for at least a week after a major update has been pushed and check the dev website.