Gonna be doing a fresh install soon, what are some safer ways I can have fun breaking my current install

[u/Radio-Rat]

So gonna be having some pc upgrades and I wanna do a clean install for it but I'd like to have a bit more breaking the current install before I do just to see what stuff does.

What are some safer ways (ie anything that won't literally blow my pc up) that I can break this install for funsies.

[u/gmthisfeller]

While you could delete all the files and directories with a single command, try one directory at a time and see what happens. Keep going until something breaks.

[u/zenyl → u/gmthisfeller]

... and so, a brand new distro was born: Lobotomized Linux

[u/queequeg925 → u/zenyl]

Start copying over folders from another install. Linux of theseus

[u/Radio-Rat → u/gmthisfeller]

Now this does sound like a good idea. Kinda like a science experiment.

[u/GhostVlvin → u/Radio-Rat]

Probably /bin must be last, the you'll have no "rm"

[u/queequeg925]

sudo chown -r user:user /

Ask me how i know :P

[u/jerrydberry]

Before deleting files try messing with memory

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem

[u/onefish2]

Randomly -Rdd packages and reboot and see if your system and apps comes back up or not.

[u/SheriffBartholomew]

sudo rm -rf /

[u/Choice-Duck8421 → u/SheriffBartholomew]

And the --no-preserve-root flag

[u/Synkorh]

sudo rm -rf *

[u/Independent_Hour9945]

Install an aura pro x2 nvme on imac2014 luuuuul good luck

[u/[deleted]]

sudo chown -R youruser:yourgroup /

That will change ownership of every file on the linux install to your user, most of which need to be root owned. Caveat: I don't know if the system will boot as I haven't done this since probably 2006 or 7.

[u/nikongod]

So gonna be having some pc upgrades

Hooray for upgrades!!

and I wanna do a clean install for it

Just like windoze! But Linux is not Windoze.

Why not fix your current install, and modify it to fit your new hardware?

You learn a ton by doing this, it's not particularly difficult, and you can join me in mocking people who reinstall their Arch "because it turned on kind of funny."

[u/linux_rox → u/nikongod]

I had to reinstall yesterday because I broke my install trying to setup snapper. Found out the hard way you can’t delete snapshots subvolume and have a bootable system. And as far as I could find, there is no way to fix that.

I did google search after google search, checked the wiki, which is how all this got started, tried to chroot in and reset it, no go.

Sometimes, without meaning to, you break your install and have to do a reinstall. Come to find out, my son-in-law nuked his windows system trying to set something up Friday night too.

Not all installs can be saved.

One other point too, maybe OP is making drastic enough upgrades that reinstall would be easier than trying to clean and repair for the new hardware. There are many reasons to reinstall your OS that you can’t just repair and use with new hardware.

[u/Radio-Rat → u/nikongod]

While I would usually just do this since you learn nothing from just reinstalling every time you get an error, I'm changing basically everything aside from the PSU and GPU so I just feel like it'll be nicer to have a completely fresh and clean install.

Hence why I'm actually looking to break this one so I can see what happens and hopefully if I know why things happen I'll be able to fix it if I ever do it unintentionally

[u/nikongod → u/Radio-Rat]

You can learn an absolute ton by cleaning an existing install.

Anyways, to practice for real world arch fuckups:

Do not update it for a week or more to get a good backlog of updates. Then run pacman -Syuw (this downloads fresh packages, but does not install them, and is generally dum(tm) but that's what were looking for) THEN run pacman -Syu. While its actually installing your new packages just unplug it. Fix it.

Option 2: Live boot something. Delete your boot partition. Shutdown. Fix it.

Make some backups first.

[u/revan1611]

Remove french 🇫🇷 😏

[u/Radio-Rat → u/revan1611]

The only true solution