For me it’s installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.
I have a USB drive bay. Just swap disks to play around with other distros. It’s pretty neat too
Well now I feel silly for not thinking about doing that.
It actually works quite well. Seperate home partition and off you go 😁
Wouldn’t that clutter your home partition since every distro you install has some things to put on there?
mv .config .config.old235 :D
I’m distro shopping right now, so I made a large “home” partition, and several smaller OS partitions (GPT FTW!). If I want things to “sync” (Docs, Downloads, .mozilla, .bashrc) I delete the /home/user/Music and symlink it to my /mnt/sharehome/Music .
Yeah that’s what I figured you’d do. Thank you for your wisdom.
Me too
I installed ubuntu on my workstation in 2013 and have upgraded the OS since. I’ve swapped out the motherboard and added 5 drives in raid6. The thing morphed from a desktop into a server over the years. The only original HW is the case (power supply died a few years ago). I never really concidered wiping & installing a new OS.
LoL my current Gentoo system was installed like 12 years ago and moved on 5 different hardware platforms without a proper reinstall.
I have said myself to never peek in the /etc directory for any reason! 😅
How does your home directory look?
Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to
I just mean, do you ever get scared of showing hidden files in your hone directory? My install isn’t even a year old, and I do.
I just scroll past those. I have set my XDG dirs which helps. If I were to reinstall it would be back once I have everything I need
I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?
Realistically you don’t have to if you’re not constantly tinkering, but if you’re changing a lot of low-level stuff without knowing what you’re doing, you have the ability to break things. If you don’t know how to fix them, then it’s easier to just reformat. Basically it’s a skill issue lol.
I’ve broke things often and had to reinstall a lot because I didn’t know what I was doing. Still kinda don’t know, but do y’all recommend anyways to learn the knowledge?
Like I could probably read through man pages but I want something that shows how everything builds on each other to fill any gaps I’m missing
The Arch Linux Wiki is an incredible resource, even if you’re running another distro. Most of it is pretty universal (other than specific commands like the package manager), and it explains how everything functions and fits together. If I’m troubleshooting, it’s always my first stop.
That and the Gentoo handbook are two of the best resources for learning things about how Linux works
Just keep breaking stuff! It means your learning and trying new things, for the most part. Eventually you’ll just break stuff less and less or know what to look for when something breaks. On that note do try to struggle with something a little bit before rolling back or reinstalling.
I would recommend reading the manuals yes. Their are many manuals and not all are equal. The man pages can feel a bit strange as they list everything the software can do. To learn I found the archwiki to be better. (Also info manuals but many people are weirded out by the controls used to read these.)
Also don’t blame yourself for reinstalling if you mess up. It’s normal especially if you need the computer to actually work in a timely fashion
Getting comfortable with manpages and regex will get you pretty far, this is a really great resource for beginners (available for free as .pdf):
Depends on what you’re breaking I guess. If it’s DE stuff, kernel stuff, etc. Usually I just find a good YouTube tutorial if I want to learn something new and don’t know what I’m doing.
Yep tinkering with the system is probably the main issue (for that NixOS is awesome btw.). But even when you’re not constantly tinkering. System-State accumulates over time, bugs are also apparent in (upgrading of) distros, and the maintainers of a distro cannot realistically handle every upgrade time-point x -> y, so stuff will likely break after some time.
But even when I have fixed all the issues in my previous at some time broken distros, at some point it just feels good to have a freshly installed system without all that dirty accumulated state (NixOS + impermanence and you’ll have that every reboot :P, see also this)
I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.
Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.
I have 3 clones of my 10yo Manjaro desktop install running on other hardware around my network, including a Proxmox VM. It just jumps across, fires up and I fix the hostname, good to go.
I’ve gone from windows 7 to windows 10 to windows 11 all without a reformat.
In the timeframe those products first released, or in a day?
First released.
You don’t have to do this, I manage some machines that haven’t been reinstalled for over a decade. It’s really just because “it feels cleaner”, I guess.
“like windows”? I’ve never reinstalled windows in my life.
You cannot reinstall Windows, if you’ve never installed it ¯\(ツ)/¯
Whose doing it every year with Windows? I’ve had it for years and only reinstalled once when I got a bunch of new hardware
I reinstall about every 6 months, or whenever there is a big feature update. It’s rather noticeable when running benchmarks that performance drops over time mostly 0.1% lows.
Especially when running a stripped install, Microsoft somehow always finds a way to enable shit again or reinstall bloat with updates.
This, plus I’ve found corruption to be a way bigger issue on Windows. I had been using a Win10 install for about 5 years and eventually it just stopped booting and I had to reformat. Maybe it was my SSD, but I’ve been running Linux on that same SSD ever since then with 0 issues.
What do you change after a clean Windows install? I used to have a script that would turn everything off but it doesn’t work anymore.
I use ghostspectre toolbox.
It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything… at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I’ve used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.
PS: now that I think about it I’ve never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling… call me crazy?
I thought we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?
I didn’t, I just liked Linux more. It allows us to play around more, but also fuck up more…
Most did, but there’s always people like OP 😅
🫡
Reinstalling is Windows user logic. On Linux your supposed to fix things in place.
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It’s always fixable, just not always worth the effort
Fixing things in place in windows is a nightmare for the most part. Users are dumb fucks. Power users and admins are mostly the same. With a consequence that when you have a real obscure problem, there is no documentation by anyone anywhere. Certainly not microsoft with their posh ‘documentation’ that really doesn’t explain a thing.
Doesn’t really help either that they change things with every minor update. And their basic structure is one big mess of mixed environments and totally diffferent visions. Let’s not even talk about their scripting language where nothing has standard behaviour.
Ffs I hate microsoft. I’ve been managing that piece of shit for way too long.
Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎
But that requires effort and learning
My Windows installation breaks and has to be installed every 9 months on average and its so fun
Reinstalling Windows hasn’t been fun since Windows 7. The OS already has most drivers and automatically downloads everything else, I miss skimming through pages of drivers to find the correct one.
Sounds like PEBKAC.
Been there, started scripting with PowerShell to have an after-setup-script to change reg entries, install tools (mostly through choco), run them (like dism++ cleanup and o&o shutup10 privacy tweaks) and migrate data from backups. Setting up and migrating took me usually 3-4h of work, sometimes more. With the scripts it’s just: Install Windows, update, reboot, update, reboot, run the script, reboot. Done. It’s like 30min of work.
Good thing I changed to linux, cause you can automate the whole process and preseed it into a debian image or kickstart rpm-based distros. It’s possible to do customized Windows images too. I have tried a lot of times. It never worked like it was supposed to.
The beauty of Linux, you can not upgrade, or upgrade, migrate, or reinstall. You can script the install, so it’s barebones+custom. Freedom is sweet.
reinstalling the os because im to lazy to clean the drives
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please dont correct my english, i have no respect for this language
Understandable, have a nice day, sir.
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Then there’s me, reinstalling the OS because it’s quicker than installing the three months’ worth of updates I forgot about.
The main downside to a rolling release distro, with that much drift there’s a good chance something will install that conflicts with something else, and nobody can really help because the only real way to replicate your install is to go back in time and do the same thing
Unless you are using NixOS
YMMV based on distro. IIRC OpenSUSE has upgrade “pathing” to reduce conflicts during long delays between updates. Geckolinux has an iso released 6 months ago and it will update to the latest OpenSUSE packages.
I honestly think Arch could handle 3 months as well as long as you update the keyring and read the update news from Arch.
NixOS rolling wouldn’t give a damn but that’s not really fair since it basically rebuilds the whole system :P
The biggest issue is not getting security updates for 3 months.
NixOS is great, you can even have it automatically reinstall and wipe your garbage with Impermanence lol
I actually do that. It forces me to backup the most necessary things and throw away the rest, hence making the OS feel cleaner.
NixOS.
Agreed in general, but I personally don’t reinstall it. My reason to do so was that I would randomly install some crap I needed for a few tasks and then forget about it, and with nixos it’s just
nix shellornix runnixpkgs#whatever, and then stuff’s gone with the next garbage collection.
I never reinstall and always recover. Even when migrating from notebook to PC I just
dd-ed it and fixed fstab. My current system is 5 years old :)Why would you reinstall NixOS, like, ever?
Heck even moving it to another partition isn’t really a re-install as it’ll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you’ll have to move over /home manually, though).
And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc’ed the old stuff. It’s practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it’s installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.
Oh just one thing: Don’t skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you’ll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.
Yeah, depending on your definition of reinstall you either reinstall NixOS never or on every boot. There’s no in-between.
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Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It’s a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.
