As someone I’d still consider a noob, I did this less than a month after getting a new laptop last January. I probably broke something trying to get the headphone jack working on it and then Bluetooth stopped working properly as well after installing Steam, so I started over. All I know for certain is I ended up destroying a folder I shouldn’t have on accident, which bricked the system pretty much and made nothing launchable, terminal included. This was on MX and haven’t had issues since reinstalling.
I like immutable Linux for this reason. If you use almost exclusively containers and flatpaks you can rebuild easily.
I just rollback my snapper.
My brother reinstalled his windows more often than I ran “zypper dup”
One of the big selling points of Linux to me was I can automate my install from end to end. I haven’t bothered automating the installer, but once it boots I run a playbook to set everything up and restore most of my homedir from backup. Everything down to setting my custom keyboard shorts, extensions and wallpaper is covered.
These days I run Silverblue and I’m trying to find the time to put together my own build pipeline to build my own images on top of Silverblue’s.
Either way, I have no fear of reinstalls.
I reinstall at the drop of a hat. Pretty much any excuse to try another distro or configuration I was uncertain about.
The whole point of doing a separate partition for your home directory is to do just that… The fuck is this even supposed to mean.
I treat all my data as ephemeral, no need for separate home partition.
Uh… I don’t have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.
Same, but BTRFS
That’s fair. I chose ZFS because I’ve used it before. And understand it fairly well already. I know nothing about BTRFS, so perhaps you could educate me a little. I’m working on setting up a cloudstack host using ZFS RAID 10. Does BTRFS have a flexible architecture to where you could do something similar?
Edit: Perhaps you could also inform me of the speeds of BTRFS too. From what I understand, ZFS outperforms BTRFS in large datasets, but I don’t know where the cutoff is. I’ll let you know it would need to run 12 ea 10TB HDDs.
Best would be to search up BTRFS vs ZFS, or listen the the entire back catalog of 2.5admins; they regularly discuss both. ZFS is probably what you want, I only went BTRFS because it is what I got introduced to via OpenSUSE
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again. So, no, it’s only productive if you are in a fucked-up environment where changes bring more breakage than they fix.
It’s useful if you don’t plan to do the same thing again, though. So if you are just trying random stuff, yeah, go ahead.
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again
Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).
For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.
Try Root on ZFS.
If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.
If the issue doesn’t resolve itself, reinstall, that works for me as a catch all solution because I use Linux like a Chromebook, web browsing.
I think people do that even in Linux, sometimes problemes are still very hard to solve and reinstalling is just faster, maybe I’m the only one. On another hand there is distro hopping ╮(︶▽︶)╭
Fucking up your computer so much you decide to “distro hop” by reinstalling a new os.
Isn’t that what everyone meant? Just me? Oh
My distro hops have been more like distro evacuations.
