I'm using a laptop with Nvidia Optimus, I know this pain.
So far the beta driver SEEMS stable, but this whole no vsync is annoying as hell.
As far as breaking linux? Nothing too exciting, but the first distro I ever tried booted with no GUI and just dumped me at a terminal with no idea on how to use the thing. I was about 13 at the time.
I run Linux(Debian unstable) on my tablet(Iconia W700), used to tripple-boot Android, Windows and Debian on it. I used to use gummieboot from the android-install as my bootloader, as it was properly configured for my tablet(Even though my tablet shipped with windows). One day, I decided to uninstall android to gain a little more free space(Only have a 64GB SSD in there :/). I paid attention to not deleting the boot partition, or any other Important partition, and even the resize of both, the linux and the Windows-partition worked just fine. Until one day I decided it was to much work to copy a kernel image + initrd to a different partition everytime I update. I thought using a script in apt or dpkg for this would be to much effort, and also quite a dirty solution. So I installed grub-efi. Everything worked fine, except that the volume keys and the power-button weren't mapped to the arrow keys as usual. This was to be excepted, they're volume keys, not arrow keys(My tablet has no physical keyboard, only a bluetooth one build into the case :/). I never really cared though, since the only other thing I could start by using those keys is windows, and I rarely use it on my tablet these days. I figured I could fix this issue when I need it(Never did it till this day lol). One day, I was theeming my installation. At one point in time, I also wanted to change grub's background image when booting. I unfortunately made the mistake to not have the partition mounted in grub when the image should be loaded. This lead to grub showing a file not found, press any key to continue promt. I did have any key, pressing the volume buttons actually brought me to the main menu, but the timeout was canceled anyway. So I couldn't even start Linux. Would be no problem if I were home, just plugin a USB keyboard, boot and revert the changes, but of course I weren't. I was on a camping trip with a few friends, who of course hadn't had any USB keyboards with them(). After the 3rd day or so without my tablet, I went to the next Internet cafe, and used one of their keyboards to fix my tablet.
tl;dr: I fucked with grub on a device with no physical keyboard, and the obvious happened.
I did 'chmod 777 -R /' also.
It's probably a right of passage among linux users to screw up the permissions on their system after getting frustrated over "Permission Denied" errors.
Didn't invested time in it long time ago, and had frustrations with Windows :).
Apart from that, there are a lot of dumb mistakes i made in Linux, it is really hard to choose one as an dumbest. Maybe this one: Forced V-Sync via fglrx during testing, forgot about it, and then wondered why flash doesn't work as it should, tried multiple browsers, environment commands etc. lol.
Locked the root account with no sudo users.
Didn't happen to me personally but a colleague of mine got a work Macbook about two years ago for development. He spent the entire evening setting everything up - Apache, MySQL, older version of PHP and all other work-related software. It took him until the small hours of the morning.
The next day he went to clear down a directory:
rm -rf /var --> permission denied
sudo rm -rf /var --> are you really sure?
Needless to say he was miffed. Didn't even get round to setting up Time Machine.
Installing kde desktop ontop of a Gnome based distro.
No succes yet lol.
Lols actually its simpler than one would think... ..
Just after the install in debian based distros run
Sudo dpkg - reconfigure gdm
Select gdm as main window manager so gnime can be happy and since kde can work with everything it wont complain.. Also if your on plasma 5.. Load gnome 3.14 or latest dev version since they both use wayland.. They will coexist better..
Worked for me on vm and on installed oses
yeah i indeed needed to reconfigure gdm, but i decided not to botter with it anymore.
Because i dont realy like the new kde plasma desktop anyway.
I basicly like the classic Gnome shell, or Cinnamon.
which are basicly allmost the same.
Id go ahead and install mate if you like gnome 2 alot however cinnamon is nice because its based on gtk3 and is more modern code with wonderful themes made for it...
But Gnome 2 doesn't 'look like Windows XP' out of the box (not my words).
The Ubuntu MATE desktop has seen a lot of improvements in 15.04 though 14.04 is still the one to go for.
It's got loads of panel applets, more than a decade of themes and works with gtk3 themes and all.
Tried to do a distro upgrade of Linux Mint (15->17). Then I realized my mistake and promptly nuked Mint and installed OpenSUSE
My mom needed to email a bunch of pictures and I told her to just zip it and upload it to google drive so she could just send the link to whoever she needed too, so she had me do it after I had been drinking. Nailed it! every picture got put into their own nice little zip... Yeah that took a few minutes of pondering to unzip 108 pictures while being that drunk. I have had a lot fun playing with the cli while drunk.
Zypper rm nautilus
I wanted to run nemo as my default. This was not a mistake so much as it was just pure experimentation, but I did not want it to delete ALL of gnome.
I still do not know how to force delete single packages.
Well, apparently a close call but no harm done, thanks to a missing (imo a bit funny) flag in the command... heh
Never said it did.. Only Linux mint completely and stupidly ruins everything
Lols that would have gotten ugly.. See they make those flags long for a reason
Hence why @MisteryAngel should use Ubuntu MATE to try the MATE desktop - as it's actually the MATE desktop as it should be not throw together to imitate another desktop.
Alright let's chill that's off topic
Hmm I've made pretty amateur mistakes back when I started out.. I remember in the early days of x64 and x86 packages and multi arch.. I needed 32 bit libs on x64 system and wasn't paying attention to the Uninstall packages list and woops it Uninstalled a ton of the kde 3 desktop environment.. Was terrible.. Had to figure out each package that was Uninstalled.. Lols
I once uninstalled half my OS because I wanted to remove the AMD graphics driver from the system, turns out that apt-get purge amd* is a VERY dangerous thing to do and then blindly hit “y” when it asks if you are sure.