Update
Hi there. I'm blown away by the quality of responses I've received here. Throughout, there are some extremely useful perspectives on what might be going on and the underlying motivations that are leading to my behavior. My next logical step is to be mindful of the emotions that I'm feeling when I start to feel these reset behaviors, and to extend my awareness of them outside of just the example I shared below. The next logical step is to seek out a therapist or other sort of psychological support. I just want to thank those have commented and encourage users to keep conversations going between them. My interaction with this post will likely slow a lot as I contemplate and try to find a normal. For the curious, I resisted a strong urge to do a reset yesterday at work and instead of spending a couple hours doing that, I spent considerable time learning through some blind spots in a language I'm supposed to be an expert at. Thanks again to all of you.
While all comments were useful in one way or another, I was especially impacted by comments from IonAddis and Boozilla
Original Post
I'm struggling to find relevant information or shared experiences on this topic and I'm hoping that someone here can point me in the right direction. I seem to have always struggled with what I'm calling tech permanence. I define tech permanence as the ability to use some form of tech (either a phone, an operating system, a library, a package manager, etc.) for an extended period of time.
My issue is then that I struggle with maintaining long-term relationships with these technical aspects of my life and it's starting to affect my work and mental health. An example is likely the best way to describe this.
At least once a week I reinstall the operating system on my desktop computer at work because I can't seem to commit to Linux or Windows 11. I'm not distro hopping on the Linux side of things (always Debian 12).
I've identified a cycle where this behavior repeats:
- Get excited by something that is only available on Linux: this can be a specific software, but more often than not it is actually the file system itself. I love everything about it.
- Work on Linux for a couple of days: in this stage I'll painstakingly craft an environment that is needed for my work.
- ** Mental cry**: in this stage my mind will tell me that I'm just using Linux to use Linux and everything I want to do I can do on my MacBook or on Windows. I've seen this coupled with a bit of anxiety about not being able to use Microsoft products if requested (though I know there are a million work arounds).
- Searching for greener pastures: a stage in which I want to just use products that are more reliable, and honestly, just more pretty. This is the stage that perplexes me the most and often where the reinstall of my desktop to Windows occurs.
- Work on Windows for a couple of days: in this stage I set up my environment, do work for a couple of days, and then wonder why I don't just use Linux.
- Repeat: I repeat this cycle 1-2 times per week.
This can be mapped to phone operating systems too. An example is that I use an iOS device on a daily basis, but sometimes I'll go get a cheap Pixel just to throw GrapheneOS on, then to revert to Android, and then back to iOS.
I've tried pretty hard to search for relevant examples of this online, but I can't seem to find the right search terms for any of this. The closest I've seen is "object permanence" in the ADHD research, but I'm pretty cautious to start self-diagnosing as I'm not a professional.
Can anyone comment on this or point me to a more appropriate community?
I won't even pretend to have any insights what might be causing the psychological compulsion to constantly abandon and reacquire operating systems - but just from a technical perspective, do you need to completely reinstall the OS instead of just maintaining a multi-boot setup?
Thanks for the response. I suppose that I don’t, but ever since Windows 11, I’ve been reluctant to consider dual boots. Maybe things have changed, but at the introduction of Windows 11, I had lots of issues with dual booting.
So in short, I just haven’t tried it in a while. My main concern is that I would just continue to switch back and forth and the workflow interruption would still exist in that form.
I've been dual booting Linux and Windows 11 for years now without issue. You just need to make sure that bitlocker is disabled so you can initially resize the partition or manually set the partition size on install. EFI and split EFI partitions have made it almost impossible to break the bootloader. And if you pick popular distros you don't even have to turn off secure boot.
The workflow interruptions can be worked around with a syncing solution like Firefox sync for browser and syncthing for files. Or by using a NAS for file storage.
Hell you could even use WSL and run every Linux app you want in Windows, graphical apps too. Or you could install Proxmox on a PC and rdp into 10 different OS VMs from a thin client.
Let's be honest here reinstalling an OS is probably causing more workflow disruption than any of these other solutions. I know because I went through a distro hoping phase and it's just a huge time suck for little payout.
Bitlocker needs to be off, AND hibernation needs to be disabled or make sure you hit reboot and not shut down since windows technically hibernates it's kernel instead of shutting it down.
Don't install Windows and something else on the same disk.
But computers can have more than 1 disk.
Personally I would definitely focus on figuring out the underlying motivation for the OS hopping, but just in the interest of maybe saving some time having to re-setup everything you might consider:
Just throwing out ideas, best of luck to you :)
These are all good recommendations and I appreciate them! I’ll keep this in mind but I’m trying to be less impulsive, so I’ll consider this over the course of a few days.
Thanks for taking the time to chime in.