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
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
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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.
Cool you did backups
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.
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.
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like “oh shiny, let me try this distro”
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .
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.
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!
If you have a separate /home and backed up your data… well why shouldn’t I?
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?
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.
