I’ve done that, and thensome…

It was literally my first foray into Linux, circa 1997, I think…I was definitely in middle school, maybe 7th grade.

I’d just gotten my RedHat CD in the mail from some website I had found that accepted COD and charged scantly more than the cost of time & materials to produce.

I installed it on my PC alongside windows and learned how to use fstab to mount my Windows Partition automatically when I boot into it! Sweet! Next I wanted to figure out how to start X-Windows and couldn’t find instructions in the Linux book I’d gotten from the library.

Naturally I booted into Windows, hopped on EFnet #Linux, and asked in there. One guy answered me and I wrote it down so I could boot into Linux and try it out.

I should also add that at this point in time, I had not yet learned about the value of not using root for everything.

Once in Linux, I typed it out…rm -rf /. Logged in as root. Windows partition automatically mounted. Seems to be taking a lot longer than I thought it would…maybe I can see what the rm command says in the book?

Oh…Oh no…

(The correct answer was startx. startx.)

I will say that I’ve distrohopped quite a bit and it was just this past week that I decided to try out CachyOS (and Hyprland), after being very well settled into Fedora…and the installation was probably the most difficult of any I’d done recently, but that was almost entirely on me…I’ve used Arch-based distros before, I’ve used calamares before…this was different. It was because I wanted to preserve my old /var partition, or at least my /var/lib/libvirt…and the installer kept freaking out about it. Ultimately I ended up just deleting everything except /var/lib/libvirt out of the partition before running the installer and it went fine. The time prior to that, I thought I’d try Cachy in a VM, and it refused to install several times. I think that actually might’ve just been my computer’s first signs that I had a failing stick of RAM, because it wasn’t long after that that the whole system started to decline…