For me it's installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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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.
It actually works quite well. Seperate home partition and off you go 😁
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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
Thanks for this. New linux user and this helped me understand a bit better why files go where they go.
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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
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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
The Arch Linux Wiki is an incredible resource, even if you're running another distro. Most of it is pretty universal (other than specific commands like the package manager), and it explains how everything functions and fits together. If I'm troubleshooting, it's always my first stop.
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Just keep breaking stuff! It means your learning and trying new things, for the most part. Eventually you'll just break stuff less and less or know what to look for when something breaks. On that note do try to struggle with something a little bit before rolling back or reinstalling.
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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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I've gone from windows 7 to windows 10 to windows 11 all without a reformat.
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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.
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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.
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Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎
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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.
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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.
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
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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 is great, you can even have it automatically reinstall and wipe your garbage with Impermanence lol
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 :)
Reinstalling every 6 months to feel like new was Windows 95, 98, XP, etc
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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.
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I didn't reinstall my system for 5 years
Sicko
~~Sicko~~ Uᴘᴛɪᴍᴇ Wᴀʀʀɪᴏʀ
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Remember the windows XP & HDD days when you would reinstall windows every new year so it ran smoother xd
stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that's been upgraded in-place and hasn't been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)
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Nixos is amazing just saying
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