1y ago

In my earlier days of running Linux

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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.
- If you are afraid of redoing your customizations you are using the wrong distro.
  
  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.
  
  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).
  
  (why do you do that, though?)
  
  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.
  
  Comprehensible and respectable, even if it is on a level I cannot even think of reaching.
  
  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.
  
  Idk. I think this only applies to power users or people who are willing to learn how to do things. If someone doesn't want that, then distrohopping can be a convenient way to get a system you like more. And of course there's also those that don't care at all and just want something that works which shouldn't stay on windows they should just use Linux Mint imo (there are many distros aimed at them and most are good but I would just recommend Mint csuse if you give them too much choice they won't bother and stay on windows).
  Basically I would just tell newbies "there's 3 main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora (tho I guess the rpm one could also be openSUSE now given what's happening with RHEL)), every other one is usually just a version of those 3 with different things preinstalled to make your life easier at the start."
  
  If a noob doesn't want to get into the weeds but still is interested in say the arch community, I would aim them at Manjaro or a more friendly arch distro... If they want to get into the weeds, any distro + customization.

125 comments