this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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    [โ€“] stoy@lemmy.zip 132 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    That is idiotic, there is absolutely a reason to reinstall in some cases

    [โ€“] Dungrad@feddit.org 61 points 2 months ago

    And often the fastest option even lol

    [โ€“] fl42v@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 months ago

    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.

    [โ€“] QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

    Some times but not most, like Windows. macOS is the same way thanks to its *nix underpinnings. I honestly canโ€™t remember a time I ever reinstalled the system to fix a problem.

    [โ€“] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    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.

    [โ€“] stoy@lemmy.zip 25 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    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

    [โ€“] anamethatisnt@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

    Professionally on a non-recurring issue - absolutely.
    With my stuff at home? Only if the wife suffers from the downtime.

    [โ€“] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    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.

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    [โ€“] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 months ago

    Meh, snapper rollback

    [โ€“] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Unless the drive gets corrupted or infected with malware, you can just load a previous snapshot. That's much faster and easier than reinstalling.

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    [โ€“] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 76 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Whaddya talking about I nuke my shit all the time.

    [โ€“] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Why learn nixOS, if not to reinstall every morning?

    [โ€“] ivn@jlai.lu 3 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, that's my issue, NixOS is so stable I never had to reinstall.

    [โ€“] Petter1@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago

    Me too ๐Ÿ˜ I have no important file not saved in cloud ever. I can nuke any of my clients without any afterthought

    This saves so much timeโ€ฆ

    [โ€“] rozlav@lemmy.blahaj.zone 45 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    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 โ•ฎ(๏ธถโ–ฝ๏ธถ)โ•ญ

    [โ€“] TwoBeeSan@lemmy.world 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    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

    [โ€“] gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

    My distro hops have been more like distro evacuations.

    [โ€“] Sestren@lemmy.world 37 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    The whole point of doing a separate partition for your home directory is to do just that... The fuck is this even supposed to mean.

    [โ€“] marcos@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you'll almost certainly get the same problem again. So, no, it's only productive if you are in a fucked-up environment where changes bring more breakage than they fix.

    It's useful if you don't plan to do the same thing again, though. So if you are just trying random stuff, yeah, go ahead.

    [โ€“] hersh@literature.cafe 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, youโ€™ll almost certainly get the same problem again

    Sure, but nobody's likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I've forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I'd do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

    For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won't bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.

    [โ€“] one_knight_scripting@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

    Try Root on ZFS.

    If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.

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    [โ€“] one_knight_scripting@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    Uh... I don't have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.

    [โ€“] BCsven@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
    [โ€“] one_knight_scripting@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    That's fair. I chose ZFS because I've used it before. And understand it fairly well already. I know nothing about BTRFS, so perhaps you could educate me a little. I'm working on setting up a cloudstack host using ZFS RAID 10. Does BTRFS have a flexible architecture to where you could do something similar?

    Edit: Perhaps you could also inform me of the speeds of BTRFS too. From what I understand, ZFS outperforms BTRFS in large datasets, but I don't know where the cutoff is. I'll let you know it would need to run 12 ea 10TB HDDs.

    [โ€“] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 months ago

    Best would be to search up BTRFS vs ZFS, or listen the the entire back catalog of 2.5admins; they regularly discuss both. ZFS is probably what you want, I only went BTRFS because it is what I got introduced to via OpenSUSE

    [โ€“] rikudou@lemmings.world 4 points 2 months ago

    I treat all my data as ephemeral, no need for separate home partition.

    [โ€“] Juice260@lemmy.world 29 points 2 months ago

    I reinstall at the drop of a hat. Pretty much any excuse to try another distro or configuration I was uncertain about.

    [โ€“] sirico@feddit.uk 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    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".

    [โ€“] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

    Until you find the answer on a Windows forum posted by some Indian dude performing unpaid labor.

    [โ€“] sirico@feddit.uk 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Or the "don't worry I fixed it" one time poster

    [โ€“] michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    "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.

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    [โ€“] DragonsInARoom@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago

    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.

    [โ€“] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I like immutable Linux for this reason. If you use almost exclusively containers and flatpaks you can rebuild easily.

    [โ€“] Johanno@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago

    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.

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    [โ€“] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [โ€“] hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

    Ehhh all my important files are sync'd to my NAS. I have a script that just apt installs everything I normally use. Sometimes it's just faster than troubleshooting. Usually if I'm about to do something whacky I clone my disk and use the clone. If it works it's my new primary, if it doesn't nothing lost.

    I just rollback my snapper.

    My brother reinstalled his windows more often than I ran "zypper dup"

    [โ€“] MetalMachine@feddit.nl 6 points 2 months ago

    Nah, reinstall goes brrrr whenever you run into an issue

    [โ€“] jonathan@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago

    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.

    [โ€“] kekmacska@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago

    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

    [โ€“] ShadowZone@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

    I literally had an official support person tell me to reinstall Ubuntu to get a specific app running.

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