I would agree with this, but this is underspecified. A couple of examples:

When I was in college, a kid came to our * Nix User Group having fscked up his Ubuntu install by, I kid you not, `cd /; sudo rm -rf * `. He wanted help fixing it.

Another kid who was quite a bit smarter learned about fork bombs and ran one on a shared CS Linux server. It was offline for a few days. When it came back, `who` informed us that the sysadmin spent quite a bit of time running `man limits.conf`. (After graduating, I learned I was able to still login to that server using my SSH key, despite my account being deactivated in LDAP.)

It's a bit like Murphy's Law: anything that can be done on a * Nix machine will be done by a learner given sufficient time.

For context, this was ~2008. I got my first personal laptop in middle school the only way I could manage: buy a two and a half year old hand me down Toshiba from my uncle for $200. It was too slow to be updated to a new Windows OS and I couldn’t afford the license anyway. My neighbor, a govt. systems programmer, told me about Linux. I looked it up and found Ubuntu. I installed it and encountered all of the problems the parent comment described. I learned a _lot_ for a 13 year old thanks to a great deal of very patient people on IRC. I spent most of my time alternating between debugging audio drivers so I could listen to music and trying to get wine to work so I could play games. When things were really running well, I’d mess with fancy window managers. This resulted in a lot of broken 3D drivers. Although I’ll admit I was interested in the naughty stuff, I either wasn’t motivated enough or wasn’t dumb enough to try it. Without a doubt, I screwed things up weekly. But 99% of my problems came from sudo apt-get upgrade rather than some other source. On some level, it blows me away to hear stories of people intentionally borking things like this. Perhaps I did stuff like this, quietly fixed it, and then forgot about it. Alternatively,when people taught me dangerous commands, I guess they just did a good job of explaining why and how they were dangerous.

Regardless, even if most will eventually do the worst, isn’t it worth it? Perhaps not in the case of the server, but arguably even then one could (perhaps facetiously) just say that the sysadmin learned as much as the student. For me, one thing is certain. It made a huge impact on my future.

> Commit to using, breaking and fixing a Linux desktop to learn quickly. I learned a lot running Debian Unstable back back when men were men and unstable was really unstable; so the 2010s.

Disagree. There's nothing worse than needing to use a machine, but you can't since it's broken because some package maintainer pushed a bad release upstream.

There will be plenty to fix and tweak on any standard desktop or laptop when you install Linux, especially Macs. Might as well use a distro and release channel that let's you get your work done.

IMO, the hours that I wasted learning how to fix XFree86 went to waste.

My machine being broken in various ways pushed me to find workarounds. I would've never gotten as comfortable in emacs or shell without breaking X11 and my login manager so many times