this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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    You are going to fuck this up. Don't come crawling back to me when you lose all your data since the dawn of time and you completely brick this goddamn computer. This is your one and only warning.

    top 50 comments
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    [–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

    they should just say here be dragons

    This is KDE, there are always dragons

    [–] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 67 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    It's right tho...

    Even sudo says that: "With great power comes great responsibility."

    [–] missfrizzle@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    pssh, it also says "this incident will be reported" when I get my password wrong.

    It does get reported, we know what you did

    [–] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

    huh.

    when i enter my passwd incorrectly, sudo does not want to report incidents. is there a confjg option i missed?

    [–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 hours ago

    I think that message is only on some distros. I have seen it before but I can't remember when, it's been a while.

    With great power comes great electricity bill.

    [–] 30p87@feddit.org 113 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    "beyond repair" my ass, this is Linux

    [–] Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 137 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

    I guess they meant "beyond repair if you don't have access to a live boot USB or the means to create one". Gotta remember who this warning is meant for. For those kind of users, "beyond repair" might technically be true.

    [–] mormund@feddit.org 54 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    Maybe its also a ship of theseus type situation. If you have to copy /etc/ from somewhere else, is it still the same installation?

    [–] styanax@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

    In modern Linux and assuming you did no pre-filtering or post-processing, no. machine-id systemd is a thing, fstabs commonly use device UUIDs now snd so forth with various subsystems. A laptop GRUB config commonly has the resume UUID set (sleep/hibernation stuff), a server typically has network configs tied to the hardware IDs, and on and on...

    [–] Scubus@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

    I feel like there is probably some software stuff you could do to permanently fuck the hardware, such as running a resistor at full voltage for a sustained period of time when its only meant to see bursts. Still not truly beyond repair, but you could make it very difficult.

    [–] kadu@scribe.disroot.org 1 points 18 hours ago

    Before a relatively recent fix, Linux would mount and expose the folders that contain critical firmware data on your motherboard, meaning you could brick several models of motherboard by deleting or messing with those files.

    [–] bigboitricky@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago

    rolls up sleeves Not if I gave anything to say about it! Watch a master at work missing boot folder missing rescue disk missing OS backups

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    [–] Kiuyn@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 days ago (5 children)

    rm -rf / in UEFI system, no more return.

    Related articles

    [–] RyeBread@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

    Laughs in NixOS (while still spending the next few days going insane trying to figure out what isn't in config qq)

    [–] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    THANK GOD we have this failsafe now:

    rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
    rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
    
    [–] rtxn@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

    Linus Sebastian: "Why do I hear boss music?"

    [–] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago

    Efi spec states it must be safe to delete all variables. It's only motherboards not adhering to the spec that are affected, effectively faulty hardware.
    If you do this on a mb from that era chances are nothing will happen, and if something does happen chances are it is recoverable. You'd have to have some truly bad luck on your choice of mb to have it be permanently bricked by that.

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    In Ubuntu you used to be able to delete the UEFI firmware from the motherboard.

    [–] leo85811nardo@lemmy.world 76 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

    Linus Sebastian will ignore all text and type yes do as I say

    [–] BootLoop@sh.itjust.works 41 points 2 days ago

    I knew I shouldn't rely on that guy for sex tips.

    [–] Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone 93 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    With this ~~character's~~ file's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a ~~saved game~~ backup to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

    [–] Keegen@lemmy.zip 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    Would jury-rigging Wraithguard be booting a live USB and trying to fix the system yourself?

    [–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

    The emotional damage on first use would make sense in that context.

    [–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    this is why I moved everyone in my family to atomic fedora. This is almost entirely not a thinng there. To be fair while all of them regularly fucked up windows, only my mom ever fucked up regular linux distros.

    [–] AldinTheMage@ttrpg.network 1 points 14 hours ago

    I installed Bazzite and it felt so much like installing Windows for me (huge install image, slow process, lots of loading wheels and user friendly "pretty" screens to get set up). It didn't feel great, but I figured I'd give it a fair chance and learn how to use a different setup than I'm used to.

    I still haven't had a chance to actually do much with it (only a couple of hours between work and other stuff) but I am really interested in the concept. After reading up more and watching some videos I now understand why the install process is so big and the reasoning behind it. This type of distro really does seem like a great option for regular users.

    Only issue I've had so far is connecting to my RaspberryPi to control my 3d printer using the .local hostname, since flatpak apparently has a bug with mDNS. IP works fine, and I did rps-ostree install a browser, which was kind of a pain, and probably not the correct way to address the issue, but that was within the first hour or so of using it and I haven't figured out the best way to do that type of thing yet. Really looking forward to learning more about the setup and how to customize stuff on top of it. Distrobox seems extremely powerful and sounds like it will give me everything I want.

    Still have vanilla Debian on my laptop, which I absolutely love, but using it on my desktop PC was kind of a pain due to some proprietary drivers required there (nvidia).

    [–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 70 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Windows user: "Whatever", and keeps clicking around.

    [–] ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zip 54 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    They probably don’t even read what the message has to say. When I’ve helped some family members with their computer I’ve seen something important pop up and they just closed it immediately. I asked what did that message say and they said β€œI don’t know I just closed it.” :/

    [–] RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 14 points 2 days ago

    With modern windows error messages being absolutely useless "something went wrong :/" tier messages I can't even blame them that much anymore.

    [–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago

    That's usage for a non tech literate user

    They will force every block out of the way of what they want to do, and if it stops working, they call someone.

    [–] teft@piefed.social 29 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    Mac and Linux users do this too. If they didn't then systems administration wouldn't be a career path.

    [–] mech@feddit.org 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    As a systems administrator, I'll not worry about users taking over my job as long as Citrix exists.

    [–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago

    I pray for the day Shitrix stops existing

    [–] MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 44 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    How times have changed. If you have used Windows 98, you were always the administrator. Your five years old brother could actually go around deleting random system files.

    [–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 27 points 2 days ago

    https://tenor.com/en-CA/view/computer-old-man-my-computer-delete-my-computer-delete-gif-12348422

    You can still delete system files on Windows but you need double secret admin rights.

    [–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 32 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    I never ever had to run my file manager as root.

    It's nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you're doing things right, your daily login shouldn't have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.

    [–] bss03@infosec.pub 18 points 2 days ago

    Same here, but I can understand why someone might want to. For many people, even those that are comfortable on the command line, a GUI is a more comfortable experience. And, I have (rarely) needed to do some filesystem management as not my primary user account.

    [–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (11 children)

    I installed something that I got very disappointed, and wanted to get rid of it

    the script itself tried to rm something in a directory but failed, sudo dolphin didn't work, so I found out how to delete stuff from... I think /bin or /usr/local/bin ?

    That needed me to run as admin/root so I did it. I deleted 1 file, the leftover artifact of the thing I didn't want installed. I then stopped using dolphin as admin so that I wouldn't break everything forever.

    load more comments (11 replies)
    [–] Aneb@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

    If I want to look at files in a directory I use ls and thats it

    [–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    Iirc before dolphin would just refuse to run as root, I guess this is an improvement

    Yep, they used to. SUSE actually shipped a second version (or maybe just a shortcut with some startup-option) of Dolphin to provide "Dolphin as Root". I think this was inspired by said approach

    [–] ikidd@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

    You're not my supervisor.

    [–] SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

    Mario Sunshine stakes got higher

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] chellomere@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

    IMO an application written with a graphical toolkit and connected to a graphical server like X or Wayland shouldn't be run as root, as these millions of lines of code that the program may use through libraries is a very large potential attack vector.

    This should be done through the terminal if you value security.

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