@b0rk sometimes it also serves as a trivial air-gap to use potentially-shady software - just transfer stuff on a USB and erase when done. If it works, yay. If not, the risk of harm is practically zero.
@b0rk and as to using it myself to learn: yep! It was by far my biggest and easiest "ok now it makes sense" stepping stone, and I still use it as such.
Plus, like, ever wondered what `sudo rm -rf /` actually does, how much it breaks, and how you can sometimes recover from it? I've done it a few times, it's interesting.
@b0rk there's always the "just run a virtual machine" option, but that's often more of a pain imo.
If I need a lot of test environments for something esoteric, sure (snapshots are great), but it's often quite far from being able to tell you "does this work with my hardware" or "what is the experience of this like".
Virtual machines are also definitely not something I can reasonably recommend to complete newbies. "Follow Microsoft's recovery instructions" is easy, translating to a vm is not.
@b0rk there's always the "just run a virtual machine" option, but that's often more of a pain imo.
If I need a lot of test environments for something esoteric, sure (snapshots are great), but it's often quite far from being able to tell you "does this work with my hardware" or "what is the experience of this like".
Gregory's Server
@b0rk and as to using it myself to learn: yep! It was by far my biggest and easiest "ok now it makes sense" stepping stone, and I still use it as such.
Plus, like, ever wondered what `sudo rm -rf /` actually does, how much it breaks, and how you can sometimes recover from it? I've done it a few times, it's interesting.