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.

  • mesa@piefed.social
    25·
    4 months ago

    I once reset a computer and forgot I had a Bitcoin wallet on it. So I reset the drive and forgot to keep the home partition.

    It had multiple Bitcoin back when it was less than 10ish. Mined with a bunch of people for the fun of it. Thought nothing of it until recently lol. That hard drive died a long time ago and is in some dump somewhere. I guess I helped keep the price for everyone else. So your welcome?

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
      18·
      4 months 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·
      4 months 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)

      • 737
        1·
        4 months ago

        deleted by creator

  • responsible_sith@programming.dev
    21·
    4 months 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
      2·
      4 months ago

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

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    17·
    4 months ago

    I installed Ubuntu back when that was popular, and insisted on having all the graphical bling, like 3d cube that would spin to change desktops. And windows that shook like jello when you moved them.

    Of course all this messing around by an amateur did nothing for stability and after 3 or 4 frustrating issues I went back to Windows.

  • Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml
    14·
    4 months 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·
        4 months 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

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    12·
    4 months ago

    Let me count the ways:

    • Edited /etc/sudoers with vi instead of visudo.
    • The classic rm -fr /
    • The typical chown myuser: / -R
    • Removed the bootloader dunno why
    • Some shenanigans involving dd and the wrong device

    I could go on, but my memory tends to erase the painful memories.

  • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    4 months 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.

  • fnrir
    10·
    4 months 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
      5·
      4 months 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

  • chaoticnumber@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    When I first installed linux I set up a dualboot because I still had data on windows. A week passes, I get cocky, I customize the grub loader, somehow nuked the windows install in the process because (unbeknownst to me, I was installing a new bootloader on the linux drive) I ran some commands off the stack exchange. When I went to my windows drive the C part was gone-gone, I had documents on that C drive. Said to myslef “I guess I have a free drive now” and never looked back.

    Those documents were important, no backups. Time, nerves and money consuming to get them again.

  • A7thStone@lemmy.world
    10·
    4 months 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.

  • Salamander@mander.xyz
    9·
    4 months ago

    I bought a National Instrument’s data acquisition card (PCIe-6535B) not knowing that National Instruments is not very Linux-friendly and I was not able to get it working. At least it was a used card so I did not pay to much for it, but I learned my lesson not to assume compatibility.

    Once I also used ‘rm -rvf *’ from my home directory while SSH’d into a supercomputer (I made a syntax error when trying to cd into the folder that I actually wanted to delete). I was able to get my data restored from a backup, but sending that e-mail was a bit embarrassing 😆

  • Luffy@lemmy.ml
    8·
    4 months 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.