I started nearly 30 years ago and cannot count the dead systems I have left in my wake. Just on the 2000-ish thing where Dell first offered Linux but it was inherently unstable after booting the pre-written disk image if you touched it, alone... So many kernel sanity failures...
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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They died for a reason, for yor growth
True, sacrifices on the altar of the God Sysadmin, and their divine mount Er'orreport
I'm lucky to have only had one system nuked by a faulty power supply that shut down during a kernel update.
I usually just reinstalled back then. But I didn't get into it till the late nineties. Back when Ian was still on the list serves.
Unless you mean nuking the OS or borking the bootloader. Then yeah, countless.
I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.
Of course that's after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it
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I used to have a side system with /home on its own partition precisely to learn different distros and setups. It makes it much easier having a partition which is retained.
These days, qemu is your friend for playing around with random Linux stuff.
It do be like that, at least for the first couple years, and typically with decreasing frequency.
i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch
Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)
I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again
I've been running different versions of Linux since 2011. My crippled kernel count is still zero to this day.
And that's even after stripping it of the drivers I'll never need, stripping it of the languages I'll never need, and even rerouting all temporary files, internet cache, and even core OS log files to tmpfs and ramfs.
Yeah, try troubleshooting an OS with no log files after reboot. Yeah, I can do that, hella performance boost!
Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.