Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Right? Decades of Linux use, been a Linux admin for half of it. Still reinstall when I'm not happy with the way things are going. It's just faster.
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This was me back when I disto hopped. Screwing something up was really just an excuse to try something new.
Now I'm I'm in a comfortable rut, but after recently having to set up a new machine from scratch NixOS is starting to look tempting.
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This was the way. Then you find Debian.
I switch distro once I start feeling that my current installation is too bloated and requires a heavy cleaning
Which is why I switched to nixos, so that I can’t bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about
NixOS is so incredibly stable it's crazy. Even if my entire computer implodes I can just download my couple config files off github and get exactly the same system on a different computer.
I'm going to try Nix as my desktop OS. The only thing stopping me up until now is I like running the same OS that I run on servers (Debian). Do you think there's a good use case for Nix on servers?
Yeah NixOS is great for servers, since you're able to configure everything through the NixOS configs. Like if you want nginx you just add services.nginx.enable = true and similarly set the different virtualHosts and everything. That way your nginx configuration is stored in the same place as your system configuration, which can all be backed up with Git, and you can see everything running on your system and their configuration by just looking through your NixOS config.
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Well, you still need to backup and restore your persistent drive, but that's trivial too.
Yeah, I use Impermanence and all my important things and dotfiles are synced between my devices. Other stuff is just games and stuff I can reinstall anytime.
Cool you did backups
I reinstalled Linux when it crashes, or used Timeshift for years, but at this time I learned totally nothing.
Then I tried Arch manual installation, and it changes my mind.
have / on one partition and /home on another, when reinstalling, reformat or reuse / and set the other as /home again. Worked very well when I switched from Ubuntu to Manjaro last week when Ubuntu refused to boot up for me for no obvious reason.
BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.
I switched to BTRFS recently, but found myself even more fucked when my system stopped working suddenly and I didn't know how to fix it without reformatting and installing grub again. Actually lost even more than I would have otherwise just because I wasn't knowledgeable enough to get any form of recovery to work. That first EndeavourOS install didn't last 2 months sadly.
Yep, everyone goes through that the first 2 or 3 installs, until you learn how CoW FSes work. It's not like anything else and it takes a while to master it, but once you learn how to use it, you don't reinstall ever again, just roll back snapshots 😉.
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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.
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The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .
When I decided to switch to Fedora, I wanted a safety net. I had a 500GB SSD, so I bought an additional 2TB SSD, so I could make full disk image backups and be able to store 3 of them (I used full disk encryption, so my disk image backups were the full 500GB). And I dutifully made backups, either monthly, before I made a big change, or before a major update. Been doing this for nearly two years now and I haven't used a single backup image even once. It's almost disappointing, in a perverse sort of way. I was looking forward to having to learn stuff by fixing things that break, but nothing ever does!
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like "oh shiny, let me try this distro"
Honesty just make /home a different partition.
Has saved me so much trouble in changing distros on my laptop.
I’ve settled pretty well on Fedora at this point but that’ll probably change at some point (mostly because I don’t like Ubuntu much and I work in a mostly RHEL shop)
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me running it on hyper v and reverting to a clean install snapshot the moment I write one command slightly wrong
Reinstall? Nah... I have a bunch of virtual machines, which I set up and customised the way I like. Then I back them up. Use a VM for a few months, back up personal data (if any), delete them, copy from backup, power up, install latest updates and go with it again. Depending on their function, I keep the VM for longer (gaming instance) or shorter (Internet/office) periods before replacing them. That's become just basic computer hygiene for me.
Wow I think I want to do this too. Can I ask which hypervisor you use? And, can you get gaming performance in a VM like you can on bare metal?
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Ah, the Windows approach. The few times I worked with PC Repair shops, backing up everything and reinstalling the OS was the go to for most "repairs". Especially since it was faster and cheaper than just researching all the issues and repairing them the "right" way. Although to be fair, if the OS is borked enough, backup + reinstall IS the right way.
Do a snapshot and roll back. Actually faster and easier.
This was in the long long ago, grasshopper. We did bare metal installations back in the day.
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If you have a separate /home and backed up your data.. well why shouldn't I?
Now I just run suse tumbleweed with snapshots and if anything breaks I just recover from snapshot.
Since getting a NAS I now think of everything else as volatile storage
Used to end up doing that like once a month.
Then there's the cloud: "Oh, crap. I have a typo in a config file. I guess I'll destroy the machine and set up a whole new one!"
mostly happens with Ubuntu. i don't know if iam built to crash it but i always tend to break it. i have been using fedora nobara for the last couple of month and i didn't break it once
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I haven't properly dotfilesed all of my rice yet, so I'm just hoping l don't break something until I get that sorted.
This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.
Timeshift makes all the difference, no more panicking after breaking something.
Early days? I do this even today if I don't have enough skills to fix it.
Being able to easily and freely upgrade, experiment, and reinstall is one of the big perks of Linux. Carry on.
I’m on Unraid now and have most of my services migrated to docker containers but on my previous build, I was just running Ubuntu Server a majority of the time.
I got a little scared thinking about all of the manual configuration I’ve done over time to this build and knew that if I needed to reinstall I’d essentially be fucked.
Like what tf is a fstab again?
So I took a few hours to learn Ansible and wrote a playbook that could configure my build nearly 100% in just one click. Changed the game.
If anyone knows of something similar with Unraid configs let me know bc I really did enjoy the ansible process
With the exception of my home data, this is why I switched to Fedora Silverblue. I got past the experimental phase and just wanted a linux that would work without thoughts
- rm -rf /*
- ???
- profit
I've reinstalled so many times...
I use timeshift and it has saved my ass quite a few times!
It didn't happen THAT often before, but as a previous Windows user and restore point fan, Timeshift was a game changer. Don't have to tread lightly anymore. :D
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