Tinkering is all fun and games, until it's 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you're about to execute... And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: "damn, what did I expect to happen?".
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it's units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors... So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it's contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect... So, I installed glibc from Debian's repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn't have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
Linux Mint: removed all taskbars from the desktop. I was hoping it would just allow me to reset them to the default. But in reality, it breaks the GUI and it's very hard to reset from the GUI. Suddenly my keystrokes weren't being detected and I couldn't open up applications with any sort of regularity. After a lot of dicking around, I got the terminal working so I could reset Cinnamon.
It's not the worst way I've broken a machine. But it was one of the most annoying.
One thing I learnt a while back is that if you break your GUI you can always use Ctrl+Alt+F<1-9> to go to different terminals to try to solve it. Worst case scenario I would do something like
mv .config .config.bkpandsudo systemctl restartthat should hopefully get you back to default settings on the UI.Source: been there, done that. Not exactly your error but similar enough.
Always remember, there is always a "terminal" accessible: Don’t forget poor tty