I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • @VeraxisEnglish
    11•7 months ago

    The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?

    It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home doesn’t reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.

    There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.

    Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don’t do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.

    • Sneezycat
      5•7 months ago

      I was confused cause I remember reading this exact comment… I wondered if my brain is starting to fail and hallucinate…

      But no, you did post the same story 5 months ago :'D

      • @VeraxisEnglish
        3•7 months ago

        Oh no, I’ve been caught, haha. Good memory!

        To my defense, the story seemed relevant to OP’s question, and the post that it was originally in has been deleted, apparently.