So, timeshift or NixOS?

For me it's installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.
- I have a USB drive bay. Just swap disks to play around with other distros. It's pretty neat too
  
  Well now I feel silly for not thinking about doing that.
- I installed ubuntu on my workstation in 2013 and have upgraded the OS since. I've swapped out the motherboard and added 5 drives in raid6. The thing morphed from a desktop into a server over the years. The only original HW is the case (power supply died a few years ago). I never really concidered wiping & installing a new OS.

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! 😅
- 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.
  
  Most distros follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
  Edit: also, check out this video by Fireship
- How does your home directory look?
  
  Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to

I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?
- 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.
  
  I've broke things often and had to reinstall a lot because I didn't know what I was doing. Still kinda don't know, but do y'all recommend anyways to learn the knowledge?
  Like I could probably read through man pages but I want something that shows how everything builds on each other to fill any gaps I'm missing
  
  Yep tinkering with the system is probably the main issue (for that NixOS is awesome btw.). But even when you're not constantly tinkering. System-State accumulates over time, bugs are also apparent in (upgrading of) distros, and the maintainers of a distro cannot realistically handle every upgrade time-point x -> y, so stuff will likely break after some time.
  But even when I have fixed all the issues in my previous at some time broken distros, at some point it just feels good to have a freshly installed system without all that dirty accumulated state (NixOS + impermanence and you'll have that every reboot :P, see also this)
- 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.
  
  I have 3 clones of my 10yo Manjaro desktop install running on other hardware around my network, including a Proxmox VM. It just jumps across, fires up and I fix the hostname, good to go.
- I've gone from windows 7 to windows 10 to windows 11 all without a reformat.
  
  In the timeframe those products first released, or in a day?
- 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.
- "like windows"? I've never reinstalled windows in my life.
  
  You cannot reinstall Windows, if you've never installed it ¯(ツ)/¯
- 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
  
  I reinstall about every 6 months, or whenever there is a big feature update. It's rather noticeable when running benchmarks that performance drops over time mostly 0.1% lows.
  Especially when running a stripped install, Microsoft somehow always finds a way to enable shit again or reinstall bloat with updates.
- It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything... at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I've used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.
  PS: now that I think about it I've never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling... call me crazy?

I thought we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?
- I didn't, I just liked Linux more. It allows us to play around more, but also fuck up more....
- Most did, but there's always people like OP 😅
  
  🫡

Reinstalling is Windows user logic. On Linux your supposed to fix things in place.
- It's always fixable, just not always worth the effort
- Fixing things in place in windows is a nightmare for the most part. Users are dumb fucks. Power users and admins are mostly the same. With a consequence that when you have a real obscure problem, there is no documentation by anyone anywhere. Certainly not microsoft with their posh 'documentation' that really doesn't explain a thing.
  Doesn't really help either that they change things with every minor update. And their basic structure is one big mess of mixed environments and totally diffferent visions. Let's not even talk about their scripting language where nothing has standard behaviour.
  Ffs I hate microsoft. I've been managing that piece of shit for way too long.

Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎
- But that requires effort and learning

My Windows installation breaks and has to be installed every 9 months on average and its so fun
- 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.
  
  You're telling me that making a Microsoft account isn't fun? It's truly a process I look forward to. Cortana is literally the friendliest AI ~~waifu~~ assistant I could ever ask for, how can I say no when she asks me to give up my privacy?
- Sounds like PEBKAC.
- Been there, started scripting with PowerShell to have an after-setup-script to change reg entries, install tools (mostly through choco), run them (like dism++ cleanup and o&o shutup10 privacy tweaks) and migrate data from backups. Setting up and migrating took me usually 3-4h of work, sometimes more. With the scripts it's just: Install Windows, update, reboot, update, reboot, run the script, reboot. Done. It's like 30min of work.
  Good thing I changed to linux, cause you can automate the whole process and preseed it into a debian image or kickstart rpm-based distros. It's possible to do customized Windows images too. I have tried a lot of times. It never worked like it was supposed to.

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.

reinstalling the os because im to lazy to clean the drives
- please dont correct my english, i have no respect for this language
  
  Wow. What an unnecessarily meanspirited reply.

Then there's me, reinstalling the OS because it's quicker than installing the three months' worth of updates I forgot about.
- 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
  
  Unless you are using NixOS
  
  YMMV based on distro. IIRC OpenSUSE has upgrade "pathing" to reduce conflicts during long delays between updates. Geckolinux has an iso released 6 months ago and it will update to the latest OpenSUSE packages.
  I honestly think Arch could handle 3 months as well as long as you update the keyring and read the update news from Arch.
  NixOS rolling wouldn't give a damn but that's not really fair since it basically rebuilds the whole system :P
  The biggest issue is not getting security updates for 3 months.

NixOS is great, you can even have it automatically reinstall and wipe your garbage with Impermanence lol

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

So am I the only one distro hopping for fun?
- Yes and everyone is talking about it

NixOS.
- Agreed in general, but I personally don't reinstall it. My reason to do so was that I would randomly install some crap I needed for a few tasks and then forget about it, and with nixos it's just nix shell or nix run nixpkgs#whatever, and then stuff's gone with the next garbage collection.

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 :)

I didn't reinstall my system for 5 years
- Sicko
  
  ~~Sicko~~ Uᴘᴛɪᴍᴇ Wᴀʀʀɪᴏʀ
- You probably don't have much on that system and/or you have a lot of discipline...
  I did reinstall it after max 1 1/2 years (Arch btw.), either because of breakage, or weird behavior, or it was a chaotic dumpster fire.
  At some point I discovered NixOS and was sold (and am still sold after 3 1/2 years using it). But it has a steep learning curve, though it certainly got better over that time.
  
  Gentoo

Reinstalling every 6 months to feel like new was Windows 95, 98, XP, etc
- Now they do it for you and you have no choice

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.
- Yeah, depending on your definition of reinstall you either reinstall NixOS never or on every boot. There's no in-between.
- Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It's a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.
- Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it's probably more stable these days.

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

Nixos is amazing just saying

stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that's been upgraded in-place and hasn't been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)
- How I understand that.
  
  For this particular VPS, I've moved provider several times, but every time I just use Clonezilla to clone the disk over the internet. Maybe I should do a fresh reinstall one day. There's just so much random stuff running on it though.

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

I thought I was alone

i haven't done that since i installed void linux. for some reason it just always "feels clean" to me

Fedora Silverblue enters the chat :) Haven't had a single hiccup so far. Only ublue spins are a pain in the butt imo. That's why I configure everything by myself.
But I need to try NixOs soon