there goes another afternoon

Signed,

Windows users

I did that as a beginner a few times but now I'm able to resolve everything I need to with the good old terminal.

Haven't reinstalled a distro in probably a decade.

Cannot relate to that. I modify the crap out of my Arch install and keep it in perfect condition all the time.

Who made this, a windows user? Friggin meme is backwards

Reinstalling is the Windows way of solving problems.

my current install is 3 yrs old, if you select a decent distro and dont fuck with its internals it works pretty well.

i suspect most of the people complaining are either on a meme distro or they poke too much into the system

The only time I've ever done this on Linux was 20 years ago, trying to f with XF86 before I understood it.

I mean, who doesn't use snapshots these days? BTRFS / ZFS has saved me days of grief.

I reinstall on every boot...

You need to rethink your reinstall process. My root is on a separate drive from my home directory. My home directory has a script that installs all of my basic software, along with any specific config files that don't reside in my home directory naturally. I can reinstall the system in about an hour.

I have only really done this while i used windows, on linux i have always been able to find a solution that didn't require reinstalling; on windows on the other hand i had a time where it just started to bluescreen at every boot out of nowhere...

Surprising to me so I must do some things right :

• dedicated /home partition
• OS on SSD, new OS on fast USB stick
• backup on another physical disk of important data (usually a subset of /home )
• other partition for OS testing
• other working device for instructions and search online (mobile phone is usually enough)
• documented setup for complex tools, e.g /home/Prototypes where you might have container setups, e.g docker-compose.yml

Usually if you have this in place its a matter of hour, at most. Sure in 1h you will not have ALL the apps you need perfectly configured but, for me at least, enough to feel at "home" again. It's usually about having ~/.bashrc or ~/.tridactilrc in place but if you do have /home on another partition, it's basically "free".

wiping my entire system once every 6 months or something because it just feels faster and "fresher"

It is normal for a beginner to only have 1 tool in their debugging toolbox 🤷‍♂️

Git good and solve the problems you create.

Goddammit I'm literally right now trying to decide if I want to spend an entire day wiping and reinstalling the OS in my main PC or if I can live with the current glitches for now. Full disclosure, in my case the glitchy behaviour is entirely on me trying to tinker with the OS and accidentally breaking stuff, not an issue with Linux or the distro.

i only reinstall when it's a hard to fix issue and i wanted to try out another distro anyway, so about 0.8distrohops/year

this is also the go to in any buisness env, wipe and reimage

Fixing a small bug, then reinstall everything...

So true, I just had a bug and after reinstalling I go to find out it was just a driver issue. Screw nivdia.

When you install, partition your drive. /home goes on its own partition and will probably be the largest one. Then you can wipe the / partition and reinstall all you want, takes 15 minutes

Snapshots

I guess the "small bug" is that you have microsoft windows on the drive for dual booting. Otherwise I wouldn't know what sort of bug you'd get rid of like this.

Most average arch user experience

Did that just last week. Managed to break my system after an upgrade. I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot it, so I just wiped everything.

I just blame it on being a rolling release ;)

literally about to do this today. Ubuntu->Fedora

I recently fucked a system because I wanted to resize the swap partition. Started throwing time after trying to recover. Realized that even if I succeeded, I'd have spent more time recovering than it would take to reestablish a new system, and no important data was on the system.

nixOS. But seriously. You can change something in the config file, and if it doesn't work, you can roll back to a previous file. It can also control for things like custom kernels.

I have some Linux servers in hyper v virtual machines and i just revert then to a previous snapshot if I mess anything up instead of bothering with diagnosing what I did 🙃

Thought it was just me.

Haven't needed to do either yet since I started using #EndeavourOS. I'm a bit surprised, given how many posts I've seen about people bricking their Arch installs.