this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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    [–] Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world 64 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    For me it's installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    I have a USB drive bay. Just swap disks to play around with other distros. It's pretty neat too

    [–] Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Well now I feel silly for not thinking about doing that.

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It actually works quite well. Seperate home partition and off you go 😁

    [–] Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah that's what I figured you'd do. Thank you for your wisdom.

    [–] penquin@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Wouldn't that clutter your home partition since every distro you install has some things to put on there?

    [–] lemming741@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

    I'm distro shopping right now, so I made a large "home" partition, and several smaller OS partitions (GPT FTW!). If I want things to "sync" (Docs, Downloads, .mozilla, .bashrc) I delete the /home/user/Music and symlink it to my /mnt/sharehome/Music .

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

    mv .config .config.old235 :D

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    [–] pascal@lemm.ee 60 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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! πŸ˜…

    [–] Case@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    I know a little linux, but obviously I'm still learning. I've picked up everything I know on my own, for the most part - internet guides from the linux community tend to be pretty solid, and I know enough to not totally FUBAR my system.

    Is there a listing of standard linux directories and what they're for? Lite /etc, things like that. Because I seem to find bits of different stuff in a variety of directories.

    I've recently moved to linux on my gaming rig, which is my daily driver - that being said, it is mainly for gaming. Anything can surf the web or play videos and shit, for the most part.

    [–] starman@programming.dev 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Most distros follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

    Edit: also, check out this video by Fireship

    [–] optimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    How does your home directory look?

    [–] brakenium@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to

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    [–] yamanii@lemmy.world 52 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?

    [–] Ibaudia@lemmy.world 40 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    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.

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    [–] Hexarei@programming.dev 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] kshade@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

    [–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    "like windows"? I've never reinstalled windows in my life.

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    [–] Rolder@reddthat.com 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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

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    [–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 31 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I thought we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

    I didn't, I just liked Linux more. It allows us to play around more, but also fuck up more....

    [–] jherazob@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    Most did, but there's always people like OP πŸ˜…

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago
    [–] const_void@lemmy.ml 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Reinstalling is Windows user logic. On Linux your supposed to fix things in place.

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    [–] baggins@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

    Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎

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    [–] Sunrosa@lemmy.world 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    My Windows installation breaks and has to be installed every 9 months on average and its so fun

    [–] TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] badbytes@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

    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.

    [–] hellfire103@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    Then there's me, reinstalling the OS because it's quicker than installing the three months' worth of updates I forgot about.

    [–] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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

    [–] starman@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

    Unless you are using NixOS

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    [–] monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)
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    [–] Asudox@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

    I actually do that. It forces me to backup the most necessary things and throw away the rest, hence making the OS feel cleaner.

    [–] anonymous_28@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    So am I the only one distro hopping for fun?

    [–] Geert@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

    Yes and everyone is talking about it

    [–] Magister@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

    Reinstalling every 6 months to feel like new was Windows 95, 98, XP, etc

    [–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

    Now they do it for you and you have no choice

    [–] uis@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I didn't reinstall my system for 5 years

    [–] supercritical@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)
    [–] shadearg@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

    ~~Sicko~~ Uα΄˜α΄›Ιͺᴍᴇ Wα΄€Κ€Κ€Ιͺᴏʀ

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    Nixos is amazing just saying

    [–] Shatur@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

    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 :)

    [–] feef@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Remember the windows XP & HDD days when you would reinstall windows every new year so it ran smoother xd

    [–] barsoap@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    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.

    [–] dmrzl@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, depending on your definition of reinstall you either reinstall NixOS never or on every boot. There's no in-between.

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    [–] dan@upvote.au 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that's been upgraded in-place and hasn't been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)

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    [–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago

    I thought I was alone

    [–] Pacmanlives@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

    Ah yes do the old snapper rollback of ZFS if that’s your bag baby

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