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.

  • Grass@sh.itjust.works
    13·
    2 days ago

    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·
      2 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).

    • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      113·
      2 days ago

      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
        46·
        2 days ago

        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
          13·
          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·
        1 day ago

        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.

      • bigboitricky@lemmy.world
        13·
        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

      • RyeBread@feddit.org
        5·
        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)

      • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        6·
        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.

      • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.org
        1·
        2 days ago

        Yes, but many modern mainboards do feature two UEFI copies and can switch to the backup on the fly - and most let you restore a bricked UEFI from a USB drive. Not sure if this can help here or even work on this situation, but it might be worth a try.

    • ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zipEnglish
      46·
      2 days ago

      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 “I don’t know I just closed it.” :/

      • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
        12·
        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.socialEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

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

  • MissingGhost@lemmy.ml
    31·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
      141·
      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.worldOP
      5·
      2 days ago

      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.

        • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldOP
          3·
          2 days ago

          I’m getting used to it; I customised it to my liking and it even has a terminal built in. what do you recommend instead?

          also, what do you recommend that works like VSCode for writing shit into that I never save and leave open forever, and has a search functionality on all open files that can work on any programming language I want (through compiler/interpreter and colour scheme plugins)?

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      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

  • chellomere@lemmy.world
    101·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      2 days ago

      I had to come back to this message several times over the course of the day to finally understand that you mean seeing this message in the emulator dolphin while playing Mario Sunshine ups the stake of the game.