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.

  • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 months ago

    My biggest thing when switching to Linux was understanding why I didn’t have permission to alter half of my file structure. I was trying to take ownership of my /usr directory as a user and had to have multiple people explain why that was a bad idea (and why simply making any changes as a super user via terminal was more than adequate for the results I wanted).

    My mindset was a result of so many user files being spread across dozens of branches of the Windows file structure. Some very close to the root of the drive, some a few directories deeper. I didn’t really understand the benefit of having all my stuff in /home (and am now a full convert. Just thinking about navigating a Windows drive makes my skin crawl now).