What are some of the easiest ways for a beginner to make their system untable when they start tinkering with it?
Do literally anything but use foolproof desktop apps in a system that cannot revert to a known state.
When you try to run a thing that everyone assures you now works on Linux flawlessly but for some reason it does not work for you in particular so you dwell deep into troubleshooting and try everything possible until you break something but then you figure out how to make it work without breaking your system so you re-install OS and start again for it to just suddenly work without the workaround just so you stumble on the same scenario with another program.
Moving some packages (especially libraries) onto an unstable branch while keeping others back on a stable one. It probably won’t fuck you immediately, but when it does it’ll be a bastard to diagnose because you will have forgotten what you did.
Mess with grub, without really understanding what you’re doing.
Also, “meep”.
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.
I’m curious what you work as? Sysadmin?
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
Janitor.
So SysAdmin, gotcha
Go through all installed packages and remove “bloat”.
Add third party repositories.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.
