Both, to the point it doesn't boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it's easier to jist start over.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Unbootable systems in the dozens. I think I've only fucked up the kernel itself a few times. But grub or other bootloader tons, desktop environment tons, and getting into states so broken the only readily available option was reinstall, dozens. Thankfully most of these were right after a fresh install. For example dual booting just doesn't work right for some OS installers and grub fails. Manjaro bricked itself after an update. Etc. etc.
I remember managing to install two DE one above the other, and having them, somehow working at the exact same time. That was trippy.
I didn't even know how I did it. I'm pretty sure that I couldn't replicate that on purpose.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually killed a system, I’ve booted from UEFI shell manually just to recover systems. Back when I was using arch id just chroot into the system from a flash drive and fix whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the way!
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I'm on my second install now. I fucked up the first one pretty handily by accidentally wiping the boot partition in gparted. (Like a complete idiot, because the partitions are labeled.)
I've never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.
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...
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 learned by a lot of distro hopping, tweaking and tuning and compiling kernels (way back when tho), to not being afraid of "breaking things." Since Nov. 1992. It helps when you use a spare PC or laptop though, no panic about loss
I haven't had any issues with the kernel yet. The worst thing that I can remember doing is messing up the systemd boot entry on my Arch Linux install.
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
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
Ah Chroot bro
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.