this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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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.
Some times but not most, like Windows. macOS is the same way thanks to its *nix underpinnings. I honestly can’t remember a time I ever reinstalled the system to fix a problem.
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
Professionally on a non-recurring issue - absolutely.
With my stuff at home? Only if the wife suffers from the downtime.
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.
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.
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."