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.
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
Fair, but machines at work as sysadmin are a different thing - hopefully there you’re also dealing with fast deployment, prepared ahead of time. But if the issue is that you messed something up on your own computer, ignoring the issue in favor of reinstalling sounds likely to leave you oblivious to what the issue was, and likely to repeat your mistake.
That is fair, but ignores compounding issues like installing several software packages over years and forgetting about them, and something like that causes an issue years after installing and forgetting about the software, then it is far easier to just reinstall.
If you do it right you should be able to trigger rebuild within about 20 min by kicking off the right automation.
Virtualization and containerization are your friends. Combine that with Ansible and you are rock solid.
Meh, snapper rollback
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.
Btrfs has snapshots. They can be created instantly and don’t use any extra space until the files are changed.
Ah, yeah, I have read about that, I do feel a bir hesitant to use BTRFS so I didn’t think about that.
The Linux machines I have worked with all ran ext3/4 or xfs.
To be completely fair, I never gave BTRFS a proper chance, at first because it felt too new and unstable when I heard about it, and later I heard that it was developed by Facebook and let my distaste for that company color my perceptions of btrfs.
But I just checked the wikipedia article and saw that plenty of reputable oranizations have worked on btrfs, so I guess I’ll get it a go when I build a NAS…
Thanks for reminding me of it, I may get set in my ways from time to time but I do genuinely try to learn and change my way of thinking.
I wouldn’t use it for a NAS. You want ZFS for that.
Btrfs is good for small setups with either single or dual disks.
Just don’t use RAID 5 or 6, it’s still under development and not ready for use yet.
You can run your desktop inside of a VM with the GPU and USB PCIe devices passed though.
However, I think they are talking about btrfs
It’s a joke.
I thought jokes were supposed to be funny…
Tbf “funny” is, by nature, subjective. Something may be funny to others but not to you, just as you may like onions while I may not, or I may find Shakira attractive while you may not, or I may be into pokemon but you may not, etc.
So, jokes are supposed to be funny, to someone, but you’re not necessarily that “someone.”
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
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
“Just Google it,” they said. So, you Google it. You find one result. It’s a forum post. From you.
I’d like to make a law that anyone who says “just google it” and doesn’t also provide the very first link they found on google that solves the problem should be castrated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, reinstall goes brrrr whenever you run into an issue
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