1w ago

Win95 to Vista destroyed our logic of solving software problems

62 comments

That is idiotic, there is absolutely a reason to reinstall in some cases
- And often the fastest option even lol
- Not when you're "stuck", tho. You understand the problem, boot live system, fix it and learn from your mistakes. Like, my first reinstalls of arch were due to not understanding I can just chroot or pacstrap some packages I forgot, for example.
- Some times but not most, like Windows. macOS is the same way thanks to its *nix underpinnings. I honestly can’t remember a time I ever reinstalled the system to fix a problem.
- With the way most distros are structured, you should never need a reinstall, since reinstalling the packages will fix any issues with broken system files. Broken configuration wouldn't be as easy to fix, but still something you should be able to fix.
  The only reason to be reinstalling, in my eyes, is if you have a mess of packages and configuration you don't remember, and want to get a clean slate to reconfigure instead of trying to figure out why everything was set up in a certain way.
  
  As an IT guy who has worked professionally as a Linux sysadmin.
  While you are correct, the factor you are missing is time.
  There have been countless times I have reinstalled Linux machines because it is faster than troubleshooting the issue
- Unless the drive gets corrupted or infected with malware, you can just load a previous snapshot. That's much faster and easier than reinstalling.
  
  Snapshot as in a VM?
  Most people run their OS on physical hardware.
- Meh, snapper rollback
- It's a joke.
  
  I thought jokes were supposed to be funny...

Whaddya talking about I nuke my shit all the time.
- Why learn nixOS, if not to reinstall every morning?
  
  Yeah, that's my issue, NixOS is so stable I never had to reinstall.
- Me too 😁 I have no important file not saved in cloud ever. I can nuke any of my clients without any afterthought
  This saves so much time…

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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

I reinstall at the drop of a hat. Pretty much any excuse to try another distro or configuration I was uncertain about.

One of the things I noticed when I first switched, was the difference of advice on forums. Linux users would ask for reports and pinpoint errors giving a fix. Windows forums would be wild random often unrelated guesses ultimately leading to "just reformat".
- Until you find the answer on a Windows forum posted by some Indian dude performing unpaid labor.
  
  Or the "don't worry I fixed it" one time poster

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 like immutable Linux for this reason. If you use almost exclusively containers and flatpaks you can rebuild easily.
- I use Nixos. I is immutable if you don't use flatpaks if possible (sometimes flatpaks work better)
  However I broke even that... Had to reinstall.
- Sometimes I love trawling through logs at speed and making magic happen because it reminds me of my heydays solving L3 support issues when the shit hit the fan.
  Then I have to do it at work and it crushes me.

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.
- configure automatic snapshots and invest in a few terrabytes of storage on a home cloud, like a NAS server
  
  It's kind of a moot point now, but I've definitely been keeping snapshops from timeshift just in case I truly break something and can't fix it, like the time I somehow nearly bricked Plasma by just trying to install virtualbox.

Ehhh all my important files are sync'd to my NAS. I have a script that just apt installs everything I normally use. Sometimes it's just faster than troubleshooting. Usually if I'm about to do something whacky I clone my disk and use the clone. If it works it's my new primary, if it doesn't nothing lost.

I just rollback my snapper.
My brother reinstalled his windows more often than I ran "zypper dup"

Nah, reinstall goes brrrr whenever you run into an issue

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.

idk but if my system becomes unbootable, i'd reinstall. Otherwise, set up a NAS for yourself and upload snapshots to it, configure this process to be automatic. Especially if you like to tinker with your system or/and you use a rolling release

I literally had an official support person tell me to reinstall Ubuntu to get a specific app running.

62 comments