Linux is wonderful, and like you I have fond memories of spending a whole weekend compiling Red Hat’s kernel in the 2000s and then just giving up with nothing to show for it. These days, Linux is more user friendly than ever, so getting it all up and running is a breeze in comparison.
However, unless you’re using your computer as a glorified iPad, chances are you’re going to break your Linux install at some point. That’s not a read on Linux, that’s just the life of a Linux user that’s always flying just a little too close to the sun. Let me explain.
You Have Too Much Power
Linux doesn’t treat you like a toddler with safety scissors—it hands you a sharpened katana and says, “Good luck!”
Like Peter Parker’s uncle reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility, but who RTFMs anyway? Linux isn’t here to ask you why you want to overwrite core file systems, recompile your kernel, or why you’d like to “rm -rf”, it just lets you. OK, to be fair, that last one has a failsafe these days.
The point is that when Linux says you’re the administrator, it really means it and the buck stops with you. Naturally, since absolute power corrupts absolutely, you’ll inevitably screw it all up as you explore the limits of your newfound powers.
You’re Always Tinkering
If you just wanted a computer that does a handful of things the same way it does them for everyone in the world, you’d buy an iPad or something. No, if you’ve deliberately chosen to run some flavor of Linux, you’re probably not the type of person that likes “stock” anything, and the more stickers covering your laptop, the more likely that you’re always poking at every component of your Linux install.
Whether it’s extreme personalization or just a drive to make something more efficient, or add or modify features, you just can’t leave something that’s working well enough alone. Right up until it’s not working at all.
Rolling Releases Are a Gamble
Point release cycles? Software versioning? Yuck. Long-term stable versions of an OS? Get out of here. You want to keep rollin’ with Arch or another distro that keeps the updates constant, raw, and fresh. This is the bleeding edge, and bleed you will, my friend.
Fragmentation Is Both a Feature and a Bug
This software works perfectly on every distro of Linux except the one you’re using, where it corrupts everything and makes you seriously consider Debian. No, it’s the normies who are wrong!
You Learn More From Breakage Than From Stability
While most popular desktop distros of Linux these days don’t require any special knowledge for day-to-day use, digging just a little under the surface can still reveal a pretty steep learning curve. Eventually, blindly copying terminal commands will mess something up, and it’s during your attempts to fix what you broke that you’ll learn what any of it actually meant.
Breaking Linux is just a normal part of learning how to use Linux and understanding how the different parts go together. Now, this can also be true for other operating systems. Goodness knows I had to fix our Windows 95 PC numerous times before my dad came home and found out I broke it, but I really think for Linux it’s just a core part of the experience at this point. I still can’t figure out how to get Plex on Linux to see USB drives though.
Backups, Snapshots, and Containers Exist for a Reason
Linux gives you plenty of safety nets—if you set them up. With tools like Timeshift, Btrfs snapshots, and containerized apps, you can break things without fear of permanent loss. The more you experiment with these, the more comfortable you become with pushing your system to its limits… and occasionally off a cliff.
Maybe that’s why most of us test the waters with a live installation or a virtual machine. At least with a VM you can rewind the clock if you really mess things up.
Even the Pros Break It
You might think that the real Linux pros—the guys who can remember every terminal command and do anything using the terminal—never break their computers. The truth is that the pros have probably broken Linux more than anyone else, and it still happens from time to time. The real difference is that these guys can usually recover from a terminal mistake (ha!) faster than the novices, or at least have more sensible recovery methods set up in advance, because they like to live on the edge. I’ll never be more than a casual Linux dabbler myself, but I can respect the pros!
Ultimately, for some folks, Linux itself is the point rather than a means to an end. People might think of it as an operating system meant to enable a computer to run applications, but if that was all it is, there’s no particular reason to roll with Linux over its alternatives—including the open-source ones. No, the Cult of Linux is as much a philosophy and an approach to computing as it is lines of code that make hardware whirr to life—and part of that is breaking the machine to see how it ticks.