I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.
For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files... and all I saw was a distro.
It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.
So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think... It might be a tremendous fuck up.
See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.
EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though...
The first dumb thing is distro hopping to start with.
Distro are not that different in practice, just pick one and go on with your life.
Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)
Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves
NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others
NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference
Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that's actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I'm sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
Before you perform another task on that hard drive, try photorec. You might be able to get a majority of your files back if they're important