I once deinstalled dpkg on Debian or Ubuntu.

Back then I did not know what that dependency was. So apt-get uninstall dpkg felt okish for me.

The funny thing is, apt forces you to type "yes I know what I am doing!", but even that did not kill my flow here. I misspelled the sentence twice, than copied it and pressed enter...

After I tried to compile dpkg again but decided relatively soon it's time for the next distro hop.

I DON'T FUCKING KNOW 😭

This was dumb on so many levels.

I downloaded an iso and was supposed to dd it to my USB drive. You can see where this is leading, but it's worse than you think.

I overwrote the hdd. While I was on an airplane. Of a macbook air that I had no idea how to restore to a functioning state. And this was my workplace laptop.

Like I said, dumb on many levels...

Edit: while the question is about breaking ones Linux installation, one could argue that macOS share the same lineage as Linux and share many similarities.

Running obfuscated commands from forums on the internet.

It wasn't on Linux on but on a Vax Unix machine in the early 90s. We were an IBM shop but the accounts department got a Vax to run their new software. Obviously we were expected to look after this little box with no training. Things went quite well until it started to to run out of space. I found a huge file called vmuniz iirc and couldn't see anything using using it. The file was deleted and the job was done. Until we rebooted.

This one is from a coworker. He noticed there was a file named ~ inside his home. Decided to delete it. So rm -rf ~.

Not really broken but I decided to reinstall but during the process I couldn't find one of the floppy discs. That was during the mid 90s.

dd'ed a bootable image over my backup drive

Two things:

• About a week ago in school, my friend told me to remove System32. I told him that I don't have it on Linux and that I'll show him how to break Linux. I typed rm -fr / --no-preserve-root, but I was really tired that day, and for some reason, I pressed enter. After a second, I did Ctrl+C, and luckily, it was without sudo, but it still deleted many random files on my system that I've had access to.
• Once I wanted to ssh into my Raspberry Pi on the local network and accidentally entered my local ip address and SSHed into my own computer, I was SSHing from. I deleted some config files thinking I'm doing it on the Raspberry, but luckily, I haven't done any big damage. It could have ended much worse, however, because it took almost two hours of confused screaming until I noticed that I'm, in fact, doing all the stuff on my own computer. Don't have the same username and password on pc and server, guys.

I was installing Linux normally, but messed up the partitioning, so instead of root, boot/efi and /home. I mounted root to Efi, so every change to Root doubled to EFI and so one. I wasn't aware of this until some months ago my /dev/sda1 with / was over the space limit. So I went to check, noticed that /boot/efi is like 30 GiB in size, casually wrote "rm -rf boot/efi/" and because my root and efi were mostly linked and copied each other, the command run as if I ran "rm -rf /" and borked my install.

Be careful with partitioning, or better yet, don't partition manually ar 2am

Cleaning up old kernel versions and accidentally deleted them all. I would've thought the distro would prevent my stupidity, but hey, no kernel? You'll manage!

I removed python.

Generated my GRUB configuration file as grub.conf

That took a stupid while to realize.

One time, I had this wild popup that said there were system updates available. Madman that I am, I clicked the update button. Goodbye working system. Decided it was time to switch back to Windows 11 for a while.

Getting nvidia drivers to work