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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You're telling me that making a Microsoft account isn't fun? It's truly a process I look forward to. Cortana is literally the friendliest AI waifu assistant I could ever ask for, how can I say no when she asks me to give up my privacy?
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
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.
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 or nix runnixpkgs#whatever, and then stuff's gone with the next garbage collection.
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.
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.
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.
For this particular VPS, I've moved provider several times, but every time I just use Clonezilla to clone the disk over the internet. Maybe I should do a fresh reinstall one day. There's just so much random stuff running on it though.