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.
One time, I had this wild popup that said there were system updates available. Madman that I am, I clicked the update button. Goodbye working system. Decided it was time to switch back to Windows 11 for a while.
This unlocked a memory for me. I wanted a newer version of some software or other than was available by default (smart people might already see where this is going), so I added a repo for a newer upstream distro than my own. (Oh no.)
Suddenly, lots of updates available! “Where’s the harm?” I thought, uncertainly. Many, many, many updates installed. Half excitement at the prospect of a shiny new system, half suspicion that the whole thing was an enormous mistake.
The whole memory hasn’t come back to me, but I suspect it involved a dependency-broken or unbootable system, then a boot USB and judicious use of Timeshift to get back to a working state.
Which distro? Just so we know who has quite a shitty QA.
If you add a repo from another distro that uses the same package manager, you have no one to blame but yourself.
AH ok… I missed the part of adding repo from different distro.