I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.
I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:
$ rm -rf ./bin
As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.
You know, the war stories.
Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.
Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.
Sadly no. It sounds plausible, which is why I tried it. However there can be unreconcilable package dependencies and all apt can give you is a choice between one broken mess or another.
You might be able to do it if you bypassed apt. Perhaps if you get the list of packages the new OS needs, just download them with apt, then uninstall almost all dpkg packages with purge, then install the new ones.