I work with linux daily, work in IT. Often I just do this as well. Aint got time and energy to fix something while a reinstall takes a fraction of the time
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.
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.
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.
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.
Customizing takes time and effort, which I'd rather use like.
Doing stuff?
Unless I want to re-customize it to be something else, I'd rather not re-make my entire set-up. I figured out what the relevant files were to how my whole set-up (DE look & behaviour, dotfiles for like fish and nvim) and copied it all to a USB Drive that I just drop onto my home folder whenever I install my OS on a new computer.
Yes, but recreation of any customization takes minutes if you use the correct distribution.
For example my root and home are on a tmpfs and therefore get deleted on every boot. Recreating every file in my system is done every boot, so reinstalling == booting (pretty much, partitioning is still manual).
When you regularly create and destroy a few dozen servers you care about reproducibility of installations and configurations. But even when you only have your home pc your drive can die at any point and you don't want to figure out again how to fix that weird bug you once had or realize that you missed your docker images in your backup regimen.
If you nuke my pc from orbit I have it set up again in 10mins. Exactly. Every single file.
Heavy disagree… why pick between distros when you can build an environment unlike others, that fits your personal needs/wants.
One of the best parts about Linux is this freedom. If you don’t care about this freedom you should probably just be on windows. If you want something different in your Linux, alter it, don’t distro hop.
Idk. I think this only applies to power users or people who are willing to learn how to do things. If someone doesn't want that, then distrohopping can be a convenient way to get a system you like more. And of course there's also those that don't care at all and just want something that works which shouldn't stay on windows they should just use Linux Mint imo (there are many distros aimed at them and most are good but I would just recommend Mint csuse if you give them too much choice they won't bother and stay on windows).
Basically I would just tell newbies "there's 3 main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora (tho I guess the rpm one could also be openSUSE now given what's happening with RHEL)), every other one is usually just a version of those 3 with different things preinstalled to make your life easier at the start."
If a noob doesn't want to get into the weeds but still is interested in say the arch community, I would aim them at Manjaro or a more friendly arch distro...
If they want to get into the weeds, any distro + customization.
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 😉.
I agree cow + snapshot is pretty useful. I would just never use btrfs for data I care about. There is a reason no one sane runs it in production. Your computer and data do what you want 😊🙂😊.
Cool I had no idea. I like zstd from them. I don't really want to argue if it works for you that's great. I've seen so many problems with corruption that I wouldn't recommend it. I guess I'll give it another try in a VM some day. I really tried to move to it before migrating back to zfs land. I do recall the send and receive working pretty flawlessly. Also was a huge fan of duperemove.
Do you know if it has support for something like zvols yet?
Yes, it did have problems a few years ago, especially regarding RAIDs, but it's improved a lot since then. RAID5 still sucks though 😁... but I read the problem is finally been worked on (haven't checked code, I read about it in a sub on reddit).
No, it doesn't have something like zvol, it has the regular subvolumes (pools in ZFS) and you can assign quotas, the same as in ZFS. But, to represent itself as separate block device, no. And I don't think this is something that's planned, though I could be wrong (as I said, I haven't looked at their git in ages).
My least favorite part was needing to use it every time they shipped a kernel update because it broke the Nvidia drivers. Eventually I just pinned my kernel version but it didn't feel sustainable so I swapped back to Ubuntu, which at least in theory tests against the supported drivers. Ubuntu has its own issues so I'll probably swap again next time my system needs surgery.
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!
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)
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.
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.
Actually, I'm using Type-2, regularly three VM images (not at the same time). The Internet/Office is the recent Mint version (Cinnamon; I just like the interface). The gaming VM for "modern" games is also Mint. For older gaming, I actually use a Win98SE image.
To explain the gaming: I almost exclusively play adventure games and turn-based strategies. For TBS, the replay value is very high, so I'm still happy with somewhat old titles, such as Heroes of Might and Magic II and III, Microprose strategies or Stars!. I found Win98SE to be the OS where most of them run best. Adventure games don't have such a high replay value, but there's a steady stream of new ones (via GOG) that usually work in Mint as well. As a result, I don't feel the need for a type-1 hypervisor, and can't tell how performant the games would be on bare metal.
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
I managed to get it to start uninstalling my desktop. I just went back to Windows for my daily driver lol. Maybe if I didn't panic and hit ctrl-C it would have reinstalled newer versions or something?
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
Bro its so easy, simply have 5 years of linux experience. Legit tho I've been trying linux out for a long time and the only computer I really try to repair instead of reinstalling is my server, cuz I don't remotely remember how I set that thing up in the first place.
I don't have many spare devices to do backups so I started using Fedora Kionite. I highly recommend installing ublue if anyone uses Silverblue/Kionite.
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
Does it work with docker? I remember there were some screw-ups with docker and the author of Timeshift basically said "Docker's fault, not gonna fix that".
I'm honestly not sure, never tried using it inside Docker. But, I haven't faced any problems running it with Docker + compose installed and active in the background, everything (including Docker containers) seems to come up just fine after a system restore.
Obviously, I can't guarantee that there exist no edge cases or problems that I simply have not encountered yet. I'm mostly using it for my personal computer (development) and webserver (dockerized servers, VPN, Jenkins).
Literally this morning I started getting boot errors. It is telling me WBM can't find the boot file. But I should be booting into grub, so idk what to do. My boot order is Ubuntu, then USB. And that's it. And now I'm out of the house all day and can't do anything but sweat about it.
Sounds like Windows rewrote boot manager. It likes to do that sometimes. Basically your only choice is taking live USB booting into it and reinstalling grub.
This is likely what happened. I think I'm gonna format the Windows SSD attached to the server (old install) and reinstall grub. Tomorrow, I guess. :(
Edit: Now that I've had a moment to think, I realized that I deleted grub. It was on another SSD that I wiped. It was on the SSD that my old OS was on that I wasn't using anymore. But my actual Linux install came from another computer. So when I dropped it in what became my server, I installed grub manually on the old SSD (which has now been wiped) to boot to my Linux SSD.
Broke my ZorinOS install by trying to upgrade parts of the OS by myself so I could run newer software and lived like that for months until I gave up and switched to Fedora
Have a friend who still does this. Every so often he'll notice that something is missing from a previous reinstall and we have to take a second to bring his system back on track
If you just want to get shit done sure just reinstall and you are good to go, but I see these issues as a learning opportunity and I have tons of free time so I try and fix my system for hours on end. Also it rarely breaks so not much time is wasted.
can't say I've ever done this. better to figure out why it's broken and fix it so that the next time I encounter that kinda problem, I can fix it quickly.
Considering I'd rather not spend the weekend troubleshooting stuff when I have my house to clean before returning to work on Monday, and a simple backup > reinstall will take me less than 6h at most (counting all customization and etc), I'll take a full reinstall any time.
Edit: Oh, now I reread that's about the early days. Would do the same though.
Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux
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.
Yeah fedora screwed up TODAY so I'm just reinstalling
And running into issues encrypting my swap so wishing I had just tried to solve the problem :p
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.
Opensuse TW cured my distrohopping more than 1 year ago.
Nix is the only distro that's tempting me...
Sorry just test it inside vms, or even install it in a partition that you can then delete. You can even try nix just by installing the package manager
I work with linux daily, work in IT. Often I just do this as well. Aint got time and energy to fix something while a reinstall takes a fraction of the time
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.
That's very interesting. I use ansible to maintain configuring on my Debian services. I guess there'd be no need when running Nix
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.
Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like "oh shiny, let me try this distro"
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.
If you are afraid of redoing your customizations you are using the wrong distro.
It's not about being afraid.
Customizing takes time and effort, which I'd rather use like.
Doing stuff?
Unless I want to re-customize it to be something else, I'd rather not re-make my entire set-up. I figured out what the relevant files were to how my whole set-up (DE look & behaviour, dotfiles for like
fishandnvim) and copied it all to a USB Drive that I just drop onto my home folder whenever I install my OS on a new computer.Yes, but recreation of any customization takes minutes if you use the correct distribution.
For example my root and home are on a tmpfs and therefore get deleted on every boot. Recreating every file in my system is done every boot, so reinstalling == booting (pretty much, partitioning is still manual).
(why do you do that, though?)
https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
When you regularly create and destroy a few dozen servers you care about reproducibility of installations and configurations. But even when you only have your home pc your drive can die at any point and you don't want to figure out again how to fix that weird bug you once had or realize that you missed your docker images in your backup regimen.
If you nuke my pc from orbit I have it set up again in 10mins. Exactly. Every single file.
Comprehensible and respectable, even if it is on a level I cannot even think of reaching.
Heavy disagree… why pick between distros when you can build an environment unlike others, that fits your personal needs/wants.
One of the best parts about Linux is this freedom. If you don’t care about this freedom you should probably just be on windows. If you want something different in your Linux, alter it, don’t distro hop.
Idk. I think this only applies to power users or people who are willing to learn how to do things. If someone doesn't want that, then distrohopping can be a convenient way to get a system you like more. And of course there's also those that don't care at all and just want something that works which shouldn't stay on windows they should just use Linux Mint imo (there are many distros aimed at them and most are good but I would just recommend Mint csuse if you give them too much choice they won't bother and stay on windows).
Basically I would just tell newbies "there's 3 main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora (tho I guess the rpm one could also be openSUSE now given what's happening with RHEL)), every other one is usually just a version of those 3 with different things preinstalled to make your life easier at the start."
If a noob doesn't want to get into the weeds but still is interested in say the arch community, I would aim them at Manjaro or a more friendly arch distro... If they want to get into the weeds, any distro + customization.
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 😉.
Snapshots 4 life
Mhm, pretty much. I haven't reinstalled since I started using snapshots.
Yup. Being able to run my home and root(s) in separate subvolumes, and simply booting into a specific root with a kernel parameter.. 😌
I had that on my phone some ten years ago. Ah, the memories. It sucked, though.
Yeah, BTRFS sucked 10 years ago 😂. Try it now, it's much more stable.
I've lost so much data to btrfs disk mirrors. Zfs is my friend now.
Meeh, anything that is CoW and has snapshots will do the job, ZFS or BTRFS, whatever rocks your boat 🤷.
I agree cow + snapshot is pretty useful. I would just never use btrfs for data I care about. There is a reason no one sane runs it in production. Your computer and data do what you want 😊🙂😊.
It's being used in Meta 🤨... in production.
Cool I had no idea. I like zstd from them. I don't really want to argue if it works for you that's great. I've seen so many problems with corruption that I wouldn't recommend it. I guess I'll give it another try in a VM some day. I really tried to move to it before migrating back to zfs land. I do recall the send and receive working pretty flawlessly. Also was a huge fan of duperemove.
Do you know if it has support for something like zvols yet?
Yes, it did have problems a few years ago, especially regarding RAIDs, but it's improved a lot since then. RAID5 still sucks though 😁... but I read the problem is finally been worked on (haven't checked code, I read about it in a sub on reddit).
No, it doesn't have something like zvol, it has the regular subvolumes (pools in ZFS) and you can assign quotas, the same as in ZFS. But, to represent itself as separate block device, no. And I don't think this is something that's planned, though I could be wrong (as I said, I haven't looked at their git in ages).
My favorite part of using Suse was Snapper.
My least favorite part was needing to use it every time they shipped a kernel update because it broke the Nvidia drivers. Eventually I just pinned my kernel version but it didn't feel sustainable so I swapped back to Ubuntu, which at least in theory tests against the supported drivers. Ubuntu has its own issues so I'll probably swap again next time my system needs surgery.
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!
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
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)
This is exactly what I have done on my personal installs. Saves so much time when there is a problem or when you just feel like distro hopping.
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.
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?
Actually, I'm using Type-2, regularly three VM images (not at the same time). The Internet/Office is the recent Mint version (Cinnamon; I just like the interface). The gaming VM for "modern" games is also Mint. For older gaming, I actually use a Win98SE image.
To explain the gaming: I almost exclusively play adventure games and turn-based strategies. For TBS, the replay value is very high, so I'm still happy with somewhat old titles, such as Heroes of Might and Magic II and III, Microprose strategies or Stars!. I found Win98SE to be the OS where most of them run best. Adventure games don't have such a high replay value, but there's a steady stream of new ones (via GOG) that usually work in Mint as well. As a result, I don't feel the need for a type-1 hypervisor, and can't tell how performant the games would be on bare metal.
me running it on hyper v and reverting to a clean install snapshot the moment I write one command slightly wrong
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.
Assuming you can pinpoint the moment things went all fucky
If you have a separate /home and backed up your data.. well why shouldn't I?
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
I managed to get it to start uninstalling my desktop. I just went back to Windows for my daily driver lol. Maybe if I didn't panic and hit ctrl-C it would have reinstalled newer versions or something?
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!"
Used to end up doing that like once a month.
The Windows way.
I once deleted my windows bootloader so even the "consumer windows" is not safe from us
Since getting a NAS I now think of everything else as volatile storage
Now I just run suse tumbleweed with snapshots and if anything breaks I just recover from snapshot.
This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.
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.
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
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.
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
I use timeshift and it has saved my ass quite a few times!
As a noob, I wonder what would be the right way to do it?
Bro its so easy, simply have 5 years of linux experience. Legit tho I've been trying linux out for a long time and the only computer I really try to repair instead of reinstalling is my server, cuz I don't remotely remember how I set that thing up in the first place.
I've reinstalled so many times...
That’s how the pros do it.
This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.
I don't have many spare devices to do backups so I started using Fedora Kionite. I highly recommend installing ublue if anyone uses Silverblue/Kionite.
Oh, for the days of constant distro-hopping ...
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
I'm sure that timeshift has saved me more hours of sleep and dealing with crap than every other piece of software combined.
Does it work with docker? I remember there were some screw-ups with docker and the author of Timeshift basically said "Docker's fault, not gonna fix that".
I'm honestly not sure, never tried using it inside Docker. But, I haven't faced any problems running it with Docker + compose installed and active in the background, everything (including Docker containers) seems to come up just fine after a system restore.
Obviously, I can't guarantee that there exist no edge cases or problems that I simply have not encountered yet. I'm mostly using it for my personal computer (development) and webserver (dockerized servers, VPN, Jenkins).
I don't mean inside docker, it used to have trouble with just docker being present, it was no edge case. Glad that it's no longer the case.
Literally this morning I started getting boot errors. It is telling me WBM can't find the boot file. But I should be booting into grub, so idk what to do. My boot order is Ubuntu, then USB. And that's it. And now I'm out of the house all day and can't do anything but sweat about it.
Sounds like Windows rewrote boot manager. It likes to do that sometimes. Basically your only choice is taking live USB booting into it and reinstalling grub.
This is likely what happened. I think I'm gonna format the Windows SSD attached to the server (old install) and reinstall grub. Tomorrow, I guess. :(
Edit: Now that I've had a moment to think, I realized that I deleted grub. It was on another SSD that I wiped. It was on the SSD that my old OS was on that I wasn't using anymore. But my actual Linux install came from another computer. So when I dropped it in what became my server, I installed grub manually on the old SSD (which has now been wiped) to boot to my Linux SSD.
I feel this. I used to do it all the time when I first got into Linux. Immutable distros will make this a non-issue.
Broke my ZorinOS install by trying to upgrade parts of the OS by myself so I could run newer software and lived like that for months until I gave up and switched to Fedora
Have a friend who still does this. Every so often he'll notice that something is missing from a previous reinstall and we have to take a second to bring his system back on track
earlier days? this was me last week after failing miserably to install poetry 4 times in a row and destroying my python environment.
Reminds me, that I want to "fix" my install.
If you just want to get shit done sure just reinstall and you are good to go, but I see these issues as a learning opportunity and I have tons of free time so I try and fix my system for hours on end. Also it rarely breaks so not much time is wasted.
This is the way
This is precisely the hampster wheel that felt like it led me to osx.
Reinstalling is Windows (and sometimes macOS) logic. On Linux just fix whatever it is and move on.
can't say I've ever done this. better to figure out why it's broken and fix it so that the next time I encounter that kinda problem, I can fix it quickly.
me whose samsung laptop will only reliably boot with kubuntu:
:(
Considering I'd rather not spend the weekend troubleshooting stuff when I have my house to clean before returning to work on Monday, and a simple backup > reinstall will take me less than 6h at most (counting all customization and etc), I'll take a full reinstall any time.
Edit: Oh, now I reread that's about the early days. Would do the same though.
Hey, at least we have the option to fix things. My poor Windows friends end up reinstalling multiple times a year due to unfixable issues and bugs.
Me rn frfr
This was me back in the days when breaking anything xorg related
and I end up installing a different distro everytime, that's why still new to linux, finally trying to settle in arch. :/
Wait isn't this the standard? Debugging can take hours, but it takes like 5min to reinstall
I normally troubleshoot for an hour or so. After that, I'm reinstalling. Fuck this shit 😂
I still think that's a legitimate troubleshooting strategy. 😆