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?
Yeah that’s what I figured you’d do. Thank you for your wisdom.
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! 😅
I know a little linux, but obviously I’m still learning. I’ve picked up everything I know on my own, for the most part - internet guides from the linux community tend to be pretty solid, and I know enough to not totally FUBAR my system.
Is there a listing of standard linux directories and what they’re for? Lite /etc, things like that. Because I seem to find bits of different stuff in a variety of directories.
I’ve recently moved to linux on my gaming rig, which is my daily driver - that being said, it is mainly for gaming. Anything can surf the web or play videos and shit, for the most part.
Most distros follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
Thanks for this. New linux user and this helped me understand a bit better why files go where they go.
No problemo
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 we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?
Most did, but there’s always people like OP 😅
I didn’t, I just liked Linux more. It allows us to play around more, but also fuck up more…
Reinstalling is Windows user logic. On Linux your supposed to fix things in place.
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.
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.
Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎
But that requires effort and learning
I actually do that. It forces me to backup the most necessary things and throw away the rest, hence making the OS feel cleaner.
reinstalling the os because im to lazy to clean the drives
Are you also too lazy to learn spelling and punctuation? Priorities.
Wow. What an unnecessarily meanspirited reply.
please dont correct my english, i have no respect for this language
Understandable, have a nice day, sir.
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 baller, you can have it automatically reinstall and wipe your garbage with Impermanence lol
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 shell
ornix run
nixpkgs#whatever
, and then stuff’s gone with the next garbage collection.
Reinstalling every 6 months to feel like new was Windows 95, 98, XP, etc
Now they do it for you and you have no choice
I didn’t reinstall my system for 5 years
Sicko
SickoUᴘᴛɪᴍᴇ Wᴀʀʀɪᴏʀ
You probably don’t have much on that system and/or you have a lot of discipline…
I did reinstall it after max 1 1/2 years (Arch btw.), either because of breakage, or weird behavior, or it was a chaotic dumpster fire.
At some point I discovered NixOS and was sold (and am still sold after 3 1/2 years using it). But it has a steep learning curve, though it certainly got better over that time.
Gentoo
Not sure what you want to tell me exactly, as the above also applies to Gentoo ^^…
But I guess as a Gentoo user you have a lot of discipline then?
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.
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.
Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it’s probably more stable these days.
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 :)