/me eating popcorn as a nano user

In Uni I ran Gentoo as my daily driver. It was stupid, but I learned a lot.

Trying and failing to get a working desktop environment, using IRC on the command line to get help from people who knew what they were doing and could advise a dumb kid like me, following their advice and getting a working DE after a reboot was the most hackerman I ever felt. I was convinced I was real hot shit. In actuality, I’d followed the advice to tweak the kernel config to get working drivers :))

Not Invented Here. Basically, reinventing the wheel just so they can have full control of a project.

No, this is a very old joke that uses the fact the command has “fr” in it to trick people about what the command does. Joking aside, here’s what the command actually does:

rm is the command to delete files and folders

-f is the force modifier. This means it’ll keep going even if it encounters problems and just delete as much as it can

-r is the recursive modifier. That means it’ll go down every folder it sees in the target and delete the contents as well, and delete the contents of folders of folders, etc.

/ is the target. This is the root of the filesystem. If you’re used to Windows, that’s like targeting C:.

Put it all together, and this command basically deletes your whole filesystem. A safeguard was put in place a while back due to people meming about this and causing newbies to delete their whole system. Now it won’t work unless you put in --no-preserve-root, which tells rm that yes, you really mean it, please delete my whole system.

/* as the target works around that safeguard, because technically deleting everything in root is not the same as deleting root itself.

This is very much the Linux version of the old tricking gamers to alt+F4 gag.

My favorite was when I was teaching a friend Squad, and we were in a vehicle. I explained you hit the F keys to change seat (which is true), so F1, F2, F3, etc. Noticing that seats 1, 2 and 3 were filled, I then told him he can hold down alt to swap seats faster. He then immediately quits the game xD

And to avoid annoying error messages about preserving the root of the language, add a * at the end. Final command should look like this:

sudo rm -fr /*

But seriously, are there really women who talk about men in those terms?

Yes. Personally, I see it as the mirror image of the “tradwife” thing where toxic men see their partner as a subservient maid. Seeing men as primarily an income source comes from a similar place imho.

They pushed a driver update. That update is broken and causes the bootup sequence to fail.

Not really. Default drivers should work just fine. If you want to make sure they’re installed and running, run the following in a terminal:

glxinfo | grep Mesa

If you have any output, you have Mesa. It’ll tell you what version you have as well.