I'm on my second install now. I fucked up the first one pretty handily by accidentally wiping the boot partition in gparted. (Like a complete idiot, because the partitions are labeled.)

Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.

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.

I've never in 15 years of Linux use and tinker have ever screwed a kernel. And I compiled LFS once.

I learned by a lot of distro hopping, tweaking and tuning and compiling kernels (way back when tho), to not being afraid of "breaking things." Since Nov. 1992. It helps when you use a spare PC or laptop though, no panic about loss

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.

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)