Both, to the point it doesn’t boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it’s easier to jist start over.

So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn’t get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?

I think I’m past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I’ve never had to use it.

Uhm, zero? With ten years of using Linux? What did you do to fuck up the damn kernel? o_O

I think we are using linux very differently. Mine is two and one of those was a dead ssd.

Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation… And couldn’t figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.

Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.

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.

It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

I haven’t majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao

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.)

Recently I accidently deleted the contents of /boot/ on my first arch install. The lesson that followed was something I would have rather saved for later ^^

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.

Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.

When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!

Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.

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

OpenSuse Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.