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.
Is it that important? I always think of it like it’s nothing.
I tend to think of it like a garbage disposal. If you can’t dispose of your garbage, you gotta keep it somewhere. Except most things probably don’t check if it exists or have a backup plan, so they’ll just crash.
If you throw away the trash can from your house, you still have to put the garbage somewhere. If a program is outputting errors or logs, it still needs to put them somewhere, so no more /dev/null means no more default trashcan for the system to send its trash, as far as I understand it