Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.
I’ve nuked the root filesystem more than once, but there was this one time that I edited the /etc/sudoers file and bothched it… turns out that sudo does not like that very much, and if you don’t have root access you can’t sudo to fix the mistake. That day I learned to only touch /etc/sudoers with visudo, that checks the file syntax before saving.
Also keep a backup terminal around with root logged into it.
That’s a good tip!
On tumbleweed I can add separate entries as files in /etc/sudoers.d/, much safer this way and I’ve not borked my sudoers since.