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”.
once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:
- deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
- switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
- playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
- bypassing the package manager (especially installing with
curl | sudo sh) - changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
- changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”
That’s the only part I disagree with. Software not updated in a long time can easily become a risk.
Everything else though, spot in.
aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”
