This is great advice. Heed this advice, people.

Know what? I’ll add to it. In Windows a power user will often end up screwing around in the registry or system files or whatever to crowbar it into doing what they want it to do…

But if you’re opening a root shell or file-explorer screwing around outside your /home folder, digging around in / ? On your daily use machine?

STOP. ☠️

• FACT: People Systems have died and data has been irrecoverably lost by going into this cave.
• There’s probably a much less dangerous way to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do!!
• You shouldn’t be poking around things and exploring a working system as ROOT! This is by design!

GO. NO. FURTHER!

These sorts of shenanigans are why you play around in virtual machines. :)

–Sincerely: Someone who manually deleted his writable in-use BTRFS snapshot when trying to free up space, thinking it was an orphan file that the system tools didn’t detect, rendering his system unbootable and unrecoverable, forcing a complete reinstall. (I found this is analogous to the infamously dangerous “rm -rf /” , or thinking you’re deleting an old Windows restore point but somehow wiping C:\ )

If you don’t know what “3-2-1 backup” means. Now’s the time to look that up!