I have an Honor laptop that I want to use as a second PC, and I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu on it for a new experience. I usually work with Ubuntu Server via the terminal, but I have a concern: can I accidentally damage my laptop's hardware, like the BIOS or SSD, while using it? Often when something goes wrong, I just reinstall the OS, but I'm curious about the risks involved with hardware damage.
5 Answers
Not really! About 99% of what you do in software won't harm your hardware. Unless you're overclocking or something goes wrong during a BIOS update, you likely won't damage anything.
Technically, yes, you can damage your hardware, but it usually requires specific actions. For instance, overclocking your system too much or performing rapid writes to your SSD could potentially lead to problems. Also, if you're updating the BIOS, there’s a risk involved, similar to what you'd find on Windows. However, just using the laptop normally shouldn't pose any risks to your hardware.
You could theoretically brick some machines by messing with certain system files, but they have put safeguards in place nowadays. On my laptop running Fedora, many files are marked immutable. I wouldn’t recommend tampering with those, but if you're feeling adventurous, let us know how it goes!
If you know what you're doing, there's a small chance of messing things up—like during a BIOS update or using strange firmware. But generally, just using Ubuntu as intended won’t break your laptop. In fact, an interesting tidbit is that some defective hardware seems to perform worse on Windows compared to Linux.
Just a heads up, some laptops have a backup partition containing proprietary drivers that might be tricky to recover if formatted. Just be cautious about what you erase during the installation.
How could that potentially brick the machine to a point where a reinstall wouldn’t fix it?