The way I scratch the itch to play is I have a fun computer, an older Acer laptop (320 GB drive, 6 G memory, Celeron 1.6 GHz). Several distros are installed on it, including BSDs, and I rotate through them for web surfing and trying out new features or ideas (like, What happens if I run this command I just saw posted in a reply?).

The game involves pushing things until they break, then fixing them. If I have to reinstall, no big deal, but: "Game Over. You Lose. Reinstall and try again." The game also includes playing with mbr/gpt and GRUB, all of which I've learned to fix, backup and (You Lose!) reinstall.

BTW, truth-in-posting, I'm not particularly good at this game. But I find it really fun! (And I do occasionally learn something.)

1 members found this post helpful.

Just like riding motorcycles or being bilingual. If it was easy. Everybody would be doing it.

The way I see it is that new users tried to learn advanced stuff without learning the basics first. In my opinion, the proper way to learn it is to know the filesystem structure, basic commands like 'ls', 'cd', 'pwd', 'echo' etc. But some sems to be interested setting Kali up, installing hydra and maybe ... start scanning the Internet.

Yes. Revoke sudo access.

Any package installations you do with the package manager are reversible. Just remove what you installed and no longer need (refer to the package manager's documentation).

It's kind of wise to not tinker with system files unless you know for sure what you're doing, the old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," is a good thing to keep in mind.

If you're going to fiddle with things in, oh, /etc, the first thing you want to do is make a back up copy of the entire /etc directory (while it's still working) -- there's a lot of Important Stuff in /etc and it's real easy to have an unbootable system when you fiddle with it.

In your own stuff -- say, your home directory -- make a full back up of it before you do any major things so you can recover from a oops.

Do what developers do: set up and work in a development tree, write it, test it, make sure of it and then install what you've done in a production environment. It's not that big a deal and it will save you the mythical phone call at 3 in the morning.

Don't work as root. At some point you might just
and it's bye-bye entire system (hope you have a back up of your important files). It's that space after "file" that kills you.

Lessons learned during a wasted youth.

1 members found this post helpful.