• GhostsAreShitty@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Right? Decades of Linux use, been a Linux admin for half of it. Still reinstall when I’m not happy with the way things are going. It’s just faster.

      • animist@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Yeah fedora screwed up TODAY so I’m just reinstalling

        And running into issues encrypting my swap so wishing I had just tried to solve the problem :p

  • This was me back when I disto hopped. Screwing something up was really just an excuse to try something new.

    Now I’m I’m in a comfortable rut, but after recently having to set up a new machine from scratch NixOS is starting to look tempting.

    • happyhippo@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      Opensuse TW cured my distrohopping more than 1 year ago.

      Nix is the only distro that’s tempting me…

      • L'unico Dee@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        Sorry just test it inside vms, or even install it in a partition that you can then delete. You can even try nix just by installing the package manager

    • Tankton@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I work with linux daily, work in IT. Often I just do this as well. Aint got time and energy to fix something while a reinstall takes a fraction of the time

  • Merulox@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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 can’t bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about

    • Klaymore@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      NixOS is so incredibly stable it’s crazy. Even if my entire computer implodes I can just download my couple config files off github and get exactly the same system on a different computer.

      • copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com
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        1 year ago

        I’m going to try Nix as my desktop OS. The only thing stopping me up until now is I like running the same OS that I run on servers (Debian). Do you think there’s a good use case for Nix on servers?

        • Klaymore@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Yeah NixOS is great for servers, since you’re able to configure everything through the NixOS configs. Like if you want nginx you just add services.nginx.enable = true and similarly set the different virtualHosts and everything. That way your nginx configuration is stored in the same place as your system configuration, which can all be backed up with Git, and you can see everything running on your system and their configuration by just looking through your NixOS config.

          • copylefty@lemmy.fosshost.com
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            1 year ago

            That’s very interesting. I use ansible to maintain configuring on my Debian services. I guess there’d be no need when running Nix

  • jeansibelius@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • JasonDJ@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    Honesty just make /home a different partition.

    Has saved me so much trouble in changing distros on my laptop.

    I’ve settled pretty well on Fedora at this point but that’ll probably change at some point (mostly because I don’t like Ubuntu much and I work in a mostly RHEL shop)

    • JoshuaQuest@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is exactly what I have done on my personal installs. Saves so much time when there is a problem or when you just feel like distro hopping.

  • Tired8281@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • witx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I did this without having my distro broken. It was like “oh shiny, let me try this distro”

  • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s not about being afraid.

        Customizing takes time and effort, which I’d rather use like.

        Doing stuff?

        Unless I want to re-customize it to be something else, I’d rather not re-make my entire set-up. I figured out what the relevant files were to how my whole set-up (DE look & behaviour, dotfiles for like fish and nvim) and copied it all to a USB Drive that I just drop onto my home folder whenever I install my OS on a new computer.

        • dmrzl@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Yes, but recreation of any customization takes minutes if you use the correct distribution.

          For example my root and home are on a tmpfs and therefore get deleted on every boot. Recreating every file in my system is done every boot, so reinstalling == booting (pretty much, partitioning is still manual).

            • dmrzl@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

              When you regularly create and destroy a few dozen servers you care about reproducibility of installations and configurations. But even when you only have your home pc your drive can die at any point and you don’t want to figure out again how to fix that weird bug you once had or realize that you missed your docker images in your backup regimen.

              If you nuke my pc from orbit I have it set up again in 10mins. Exactly. Every single file.

      • Emi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Heavy disagree… why pick between distros when you can build an environment unlike others, that fits your personal needs/wants.

        One of the best parts about Linux is this freedom. If you don’t care about this freedom you should probably just be on windows. If you want something different in your Linux, alter it, don’t distro hop.

  • CIWS-30@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.