This was the way. Then you find Debian.
Cool you did backups
I reinstalled Linux when it crashes, or used Timeshift for years, but at this time I learned totally nothing.
Then I tried Arch manual installation, and it changes my mind.
have / on one partition and /home on another, when reinstalling, reformat or reuse / and set the other as /home again. Worked very well when I switched from Ubuntu to Manjaro last week when Ubuntu refused to boot up for me for no obvious reason.
You give that up that strategy and lean into fixing shit when you put the time in to customize the OS and desktop/window manager experience... at that point you should understand your system well enough to make fixing it easier, and you are also afraid of having to redo some of your customization. That being said, you still should make regular system backups, especially if you are tinkering with the OS experience a lot.
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like "oh shiny, let me try this distro"
Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
When I decided to switch to Fedora, I wanted a safety net. I had a 500GB SSD, so I bought an additional 2TB SSD, so I could make full disk image backups and be able to store 3 of them (I used full disk encryption, so my disk image backups were the full 500GB). And I dutifully made backups, either monthly, before I made a big change, or before a major update. Been doing this for nearly two years now and I haven't used a single backup image even once. It's almost disappointing, in a perverse sort of way. I was looking forward to having to learn stuff by fixing things that break, but nothing ever does!
Ah, the Windows approach. The few times I worked with PC Repair shops, backing up everything and reinstalling the OS was the go to for most "repairs". Especially since it was faster and cheaper than just researching all the issues and repairing them the "right" way. Although to be fair, if the OS is borked enough, backup + reinstall IS the right way.
me running it on hyper v and reverting to a clean install snapshot the moment I write one command slightly wrong
Reinstall? Nah... I have a bunch of virtual machines, which I set up and customised the way I like. Then I back them up. Use a VM for a few months, back up personal data (if any), delete them, copy from backup, power up, install latest updates and go with it again. Depending on their function, I keep the VM for longer (gaming instance) or shorter (Internet/office) periods before replacing them. That's become just basic computer hygiene for me.
If you have a separate /home and backed up your data.. well why shouldn't I?
This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.
Then there's the cloud: "Oh, crap. I have a typo in a config file. I guess I'll destroy the machine and set up a whole new one!"
Used to end up doing that like once a month.
Now I just run suse tumbleweed with snapshots and if anything breaks I just recover from snapshot.
Since getting a NAS I now think of everything else as volatile storage
Timeshift makes all the difference, no more panicking after breaking something.
- rm -rf /*
- ???
- profit
I still think that's a legitimate troubleshooting strategy. đ
I've reinstalled so many times...
I haven't properly dotfilesed all of my rice yet, so I'm just hoping l don't break something until I get that sorted.
Early days? I do this even today if I don't have enough skills to fix it.
I use timeshift and it has saved my ass quite a few times!
Iâm on Unraid now and have most of my services migrated to docker containers but on my previous build, I was just running Ubuntu Server a majority of the time.
I got a little scared thinking about all of the manual configuration Iâve done over time to this build and knew that if I needed to reinstall Iâd essentially be fucked.
Like what tf is a fstab again?
So I took a few hours to learn Ansible and wrote a playbook that could configure my build nearly 100% in just one click. Changed the game.
If anyone knows of something similar with Unraid configs let me know bc I really did enjoy the ansible process
Being able to easily and freely upgrade, experiment, and reinstall is one of the big perks of Linux. Carry on.
With the exception of my home data, this is why I switched to Fedora Silverblue. I got past the experimental phase and just wanted a linux that would work without thoughts
I feel this. I used to do it all the time when I first got into Linux. Immutable distros will make this a non-issue.
I don't have many spare devices to do backups so I started using Fedora Kionite. I highly recommend installing ublue if anyone uses Silverblue/Kionite.
Hey, at least we have the option to fix things. My poor Windows friends end up reinstalling multiple times a year due to unfixable issues and bugs.
Thatâs how the pros do it.
Oh, for the days of constant distro-hopping ...
Literally this morning I started getting boot errors. It is telling me WBM can't find the boot file. But I should be booting into grub, so idk what to do. My boot order is Ubuntu, then USB. And that's it. And now I'm out of the house all day and can't do anything but sweat about it.
can't say I've ever done this. better to figure out why it's broken and fix it so that the next time I encounter that kinda problem, I can fix it quickly.
Reinstalling is Windows (and sometimes macOS) logic. On Linux just fix whatever it is and move on.
This is precisely the hampster wheel that felt like it led me to osx.
This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.
This was me back in the days when breaking anything xorg related
earlier days? this was me last week after failing miserably to install poetry 4 times in a row and destroying my python environment.
If you just want to get shit done sure just reinstall and you are good to go, but I see these issues as a learning opportunity and I have tons of free time so I try and fix my system for hours on end. Also it rarely breaks so not much time is wasted.
I switch distro once I start feeling that my current installation is too bloated and requires a heavy cleaning
Which is why I switched to nixos, so that I canât bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about
This is the way
Me rn frfr
me whose samsung laptop will only reliably boot with kubuntu:
:(Broke my ZorinOS install by trying to upgrade parts of the OS by myself so I could run newer software and lived like that for months until I gave up and switched to Fedora
Reminds me, that I want to "fix" my install.
Have a friend who still does this. Every so often he'll notice that something is missing from a previous reinstall and we have to take a second to bring his system back on track
Considering I'd rather not spend the weekend troubleshooting stuff when I have my house to clean before returning to work on Monday, and a simple backup > reinstall will take me less than 6h at most (counting all customization and etc), I'll take a full reinstall any time.
Edit: Oh, now I reread that's about the early days. Would do the same though.
and I end up installing a different distro everytime, that's why still new to linux, finally trying to settle in arch. :/
Wait isn't this the standard? Debugging can take hours, but it takes like 5min to reinstall
I normally troubleshoot for an hour or so. After that, I'm reinstalling. Fuck this shit đ
