For me it's installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.
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 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 😅
🫡
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)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.
Remember the windows XP & HDD days when you would reinstall windows every new year so it ran smoother xd
stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that's been upgraded in-place and hasn't been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)
How I understand that.
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.
Nixos is amazing just saying
I thought I was alone
Ah yes do the old snapper rollback of ZFS if that’s your bag baby
i haven't done that since i installed void linux. for some reason it just always "feels clean" to me
I did this with windows. Not so much macos until later versions started ballooning in size and being optimized for SSDs.
Clean install is more than feel safe. It is safe as it is a fresh start and will eliminate anything you missed that is not desirable.
I reinstall on an estimated average of about monthly, distro hopping skewed that, it so should be around a bit less than bimonthly.
dotbot and a list of apps
OSTree users: I have no such weaknesses
I've been running the same installation since 2012.
obligatory: "arch, btw"
