One time my computer ran way, way worse after I cleaned it. Like it was so bad and noticeable that I thought I had a virus or something, and spent a ton of time looking at task manager and stuff like that. Then, I opened it again and realized the motheboard power cable was only partially in. Plugged it back in fully and it ran perfectly.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
25 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
68243 readers
507 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
What is task manager? Do you mean btop? I smell a windows user. (jokes)
I assume there is a task manager in Linux but I don't know because I just use btop.
In the old days of IRC I fell for the good old ’rm - rf /’ once, in a root prompt ofcourse. That was before rm got some sanity check that would protect against this.
Not exactly Linux related but I think it is in the same spirit.
I self-host a git server at home which uses non-default SSH port. In my home network I did a local port-forward from port 22, so that I didn't have to specify it every time I connect to it. I somehow messed up the port-forward rule, so it routed all outbound traffic to port 22 to my home server. I didn't notice this for a while.
After a few months I tried to connect to another SSH server (public, work-related) and it failed. I tried the same with a VPN with an exit node in another country and this time it worked. I got scared that my ISP or some adversary was trying to do a MITM attack. I remembered my local network configuration about an hour later. Gave myself a big scare that day. 😅
I like to tell people who are new/scared of computers that breaking stuff is part of learning. And those are seem like wizards with technology probably have the most cyber-skeletons in their closet.
Biggest "whoopsy" I've ever done was actually back on my first laptop running Windows Vista. 12yo me went on the hunt for "free frame-rate" so I could play Minecraft at higher than 15fps So I looked into overclocking and of course since I was a dumb kid, I didn't try incrementally increase the clock/power draw and instead just cranked everything to max...Yeah I didn't have a computer for a most of the year after that.
As for dumb stuff I've done on Linux, Well I once spend most of a day compiling Librewolf from source because I didn't know how the AUR worked yet. That and un-mounting my boot drive while trying to mount an iso image through the terminal one time...maybe twice...
A few years ago at $DAYJOB, we were evaluating Apache Nifi, which is basically a data routing tool. I wanted to use it for reading some files from one directory and just writing them back out to another.
So, I figured, I have two stray files in my home-directory, I'll just tell it to read straight from the home-directory.
What I didn't expect, is that it would recurse into subdirectories.
And even less so, that it would remove the files it had read.
So, all the files in my home-directory were gone.
Although, it had written them dutifully to that other directory. So, in theory, I still had all my files.
But it hadn't copied the folder structure. Documents, SSH keys, cache files, everything was placed into a single, flat folder.
mv important.sql ...