i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch

I used to have a side system with /home on its own partition precisely to learn different distros and setups. It makes it much easier having a partition which is retained.

These days, qemu is your friend for playing around with random Linux stuff.

I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.

Of course that's after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it

Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.

Both, to the point it doesn't boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it's easier to jist start over.

I would actually be amazed if I ever bricked a PC fucking around with installing software to it. At the very worst, I might have to move a jumper pin to flash the CMOS and start fresh like I never even touched the thing. If somehow even that fails, it would be a unique experience.

Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)

Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.

I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again

I haven't had any issues with the kernel yet. The worst thing that I can remember doing is messing up the systemd boot entry on my Arch Linux install.