Encrypting a drive with Linux, then encrypting a VM within Linux with my Bitcoin wallet information in it, which I was gifted 5 bitcoin before it was popular and just forgot about it. I was 13 at the time and didn't know what I was doing. Lost all my passwords, or I might have even just wiped my entire drive. Got a pile of hard drives to go through and see which one has Linux on it, but that's only the first step.

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

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.

I tried too many distros.

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...

It always involves

sudo rm -rf *

I don't think I've ever lost more time than I've gained in knowledge from the mistakes, if that makes any sense.

Never lost any money with linux.

Bought a Samsung mini laser printer and found that it is Windows only. I gave it to a neighbour.

My payroll company came out with a be version that won't work in Linux. They wouldn't accommodate me and I was too deep into their ecosystem to change companies so I ended up having to buy a Windows license so I could run a virtual machine every time I had to do payroll.

Edit: My mistake was getting too dependent on a company that doesn't care about Linux users.

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?

dd if=fedora.iso of=my ssd instead of flash drive :’(

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.

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.

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.

distrohopping. timewaster.

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.

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 😆

Spending money on a crowdfunded Linux device.

Fuck you fxtec

I'm actually amazed I haven't had any costly mistakes yet considering I'm the kind of person to say "it's just dd, what's the worst that can happen? it'll be fine no worries". Since I've installed Arch a year ago I've been constantly expecting to catastrophically break something... and my system is still running, somehow. It's very perplexing.

I've been running Linux since 2011, starting with our data recovery and antivirus scanning system at the computer repair shop I was working for at the time.

Even my boss didn't understand why I wanted to install Linux. Keep in mind, this is back when the TDSS/Alureon rootkit was going around on Windows systems.

I explained it like it was, that if our main backup/antivirus system was running the same OS as the infected computers coming in, then it was only a matter of time before our main system got infected.

So, he accepted my advice and let me set everything up. More or less just the bare basics really, smartmontools, gparted, firefox, google earth (just because), and a few other relevant programs to help with our daily tasks.

Then, one day when I was off work, a new employee decided to install some plugin into Firefox to share bookmarks and stuff across different devices..

Somehow, he borked the main tech user account, it wouldn't even login to the user interface anymore :(

I had to spend a few hours, with the skeptical boss over my shoulder, waiting to see if I could get the system back running right again.

And so I did, while learning lots of new things at the same time. When I learned the hotkeys to switch to other terminal sessions, then I figured out how to create a new account, erase the old account, and get logged back in and running.

The customer data backup drive was separate and detached through all that, so customer data was safe the whole time.

The boss almost said fuckit, reinstall Windows, but I was persistent. And that system helped salvage over 200 systems with the TDSS rootkit, which would have almost certainly doomed our backup system if it was running Windows.

I told that new guy to never fuck with my operating system setup or configuration again, at least not before consulting me and getting approval or even assistance first.

When you got a bare minimum of the past 100 customers' data backed up and virus checked, you don't dick around with the main backup system.

So, honestly, I can't think of a single truly costly mistake that Linux has cost me..

As far as that other employee that messed it up for a bit, well I dunno, it wasn't too long after that the boss fired him...

One time I've lost around 200gb of data, by accidentally removing a folder, instead of its symlink. Didn't have backups either, but it wasn't anything I couldn't get again

DE hopping/Switching to a new Distro without testing it in a VM

None, using Linux never been a mistake, every mishaps is a learning process

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.

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.

Sometimes I forget why I did something and undo it. Then, when I remember, I hope I made a text file documenting what I did to begin with. If not, back to search.