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The Dumbest of All Linux Users
🕑 Added 2024-01-16 04:08:18 +0000 UTCSo I recently (as of writing this) had a problem. Most of my git repo work happens in one big repo. It has all of my dots in there, and I symlink from there to where those dots need to go. Yes, I could use a dot file manager tool, but this way works, and I understand how it works. Those others are too much like magic to me. I'm not a wizard, Harry.
So, I made some very, shall we say, poor decisions when working with Hyprland about a week ago. I grabbed someone else's dots, and YOLO'd it right into running their install scripts, which did not end well for me. This led to me having to yeet all of my dot files, and instead of rolling back via git (which would have been the smart thing to do and the proper way of doing this), I decided it would be just easier to re-clone the entire repo.
And I did that.
It worked wonderfully. I ended up back where I needed to be, and I went on with my day like that never happened. In fact, I *forgot* that it ever happened. At least I did until I went to push some xmonad changes that I had made.
I sat for hours trying to figure out why on Earth git kept asking for my username and ssh passphrase. I've had ssh-add and ssh-agent set up for a long time and have been quite happy to never have to enter my password. So why was it asking for a username that Git should already have? And why ask for a password?
I hadn't an effing clue.
The amount of working around I did is ridiculous. I removed the ssh keys I've been using for over a year and reset up a new one, registered it with GitHub, GitLab, and borgebase, and then tried to push my changes, fully expecting that it would work. It didn't. Same problem.
So, pissed off, I removed gnome-ssh-add, which I use for authentication. That didn't help. That, while installed, was throwing off some GTK errors, so I removed every GTK config directory that I had. Still, same issue.
Then I pulled out the big guns. You see, I thought that stupid install script from the random person I used had eff'd everything up. Somehow, that script messed with my ssh, and I was so dumb, I just ran it without knowing what it was doing (to be fair, it's a popular person, and those dots are well-used, so it isn't a totally random person, but still...). So, figuring that it had installed something along the way that was messing with my OpenSSH service, I did a btrfs snapshot rollback all the way back to December 24th. Take that pesky SSH issue! Surely that was enough to fix it!
Nope.
So, remember all the way back, about 500 words ago, when I said I re-cloned that git repo where all my dot files are stored? It turns out that this idiot decided to clone it *using HTTPS* and not *ssh*. What happens when you try to push something via ssh that isn't an ssh repo? It asks you to set up a new username and asks for a password.
Fuck me.
This was hours of me fucking around with my system, and in the end, I was a fucking moron. All I had to do was re-init it as an ssh repo, and it pushed **just fine**.
Linux users the world over are dumb. But y'all, I be the dumbest of them all. Sure, I had forgotten I did that, but why pull that down via HTTPS in the first place? Who knows? I do know that I will never get this waste of time out of my head. How silly.
Anywhoo, in the comments, let me know of a time you too have been a dumb Linux user.
I hope everyone has a wonderful week. It has to be better than mine.
Matt
