If you delete /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/* you can brick your motherboard. If it doesn’t have a recovery mode of some kind then it will be permanently bricked.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/UEFI-rm-root-directory

Edit: most modern hardware comes with protections against this nowadays though

I’ll just repost this repost of my personal experience then:

Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:

My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.

I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.

Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.

Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.

I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

Edit: and there’s also flatpak which-despite being awful in some ways-is better than snap in every conceivable way.

Canonical: snap snap snap snap snap snap snap snap snap

I didn’t say it’s the actual diagram, I said it’s referencing it. Also chill. It’s a stupid meme

You just LOLd 🤔

A version that made me crack up was “astronauts use Linux because there’s no sound in space”

You are awesome for using Linux. Any Linux. That’s a fact

You did good, son. You did good. Rest now, you earned it

Nix is probably offscreen to the extreme right

🫡

It’s a meme sub though

Gotta dig in early before the pesky Americans wake up

And there’s no shame in that! Use whatever works for you and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

NixOS is a different approach to package management. Instead of installing packages using a package manager, you edit nix files (written in the nix language). Instead of changing individual config files for the programs and services you install (e.g nginx.conf or postfix.conf, each having a different syntax), you configure them using nix configuration files with a unified syntax.

There is a catch: your system becomes immutable and fully reproducible. Clone the file tree under /etc/nix from one system to another, apply it, and they become identical.

The configuration files are written in a functional language that allows you to customise your system as much as you like.

Read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS

Edit: I actually use Nix on Fedora (you can install it on other distros without fully migrating!), and I use home-manager to manage my user environment and dot files. It’s pretty cozy.

Edit 2: and to answer the second question, I use it on my servers because it has comparable stability to Debian-likes while also being super convenient to use. A unified approach to server configuration is a win for me.

Same. I run Fedora on my desktop and laptop and Nix on my servers (except one that’s still using Ubuntu and I keep putting off migrating it but it’ll happen eventually)

“Maybe I was the problem?”

Nice! CachyOS and Nix are on my bucket list but I’m content with fedora atm. Used to run the CachyOS kernel on fedora before though. I think it’s an interesting choice to enable LTO for the entire kernel, and the performance was top notch! Too bad it broke my kernel headers package which broke the nvidia drivers so I had to cut my losses and purge everything back then.

What distro, and how do you like it compared to windows so far? (And I’m assuming you’re not using Arch since you didn’t say anything)

I just put “[object Object]” in one of the survey fields when I don’t like the company.

Does Debian have HWE kernels like Ubuntu? They were called backports I think