Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux

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)

The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.

I did this without having my distro broken. It was like "oh shiny, let me try this distro"

Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .

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.

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!"

Early days? I do this even today if I don't have enough skills to fix it.

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

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.

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.

Oh, for the days of constant distro-hopping ...

That’s how the pros do it.

I use timeshift and it has saved my ass quite a few times!

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.

Me rn frfr

Cool you did backups

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

me whose samsung laptop will only reliably boot with kubuntu:
:(

BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.

earlier days? this was me last week after failing miserably to install poetry 4 times in a row and destroying my python environment.

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.

Reminds me, that I want to "fix" my install.

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.

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

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.

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.

I normally troubleshoot for an hour or so. After that, I'm reinstalling. Fuck this shit 😂

This was me back in the days when breaking anything xorg related

Since getting a NAS I now think of everything else as volatile storage

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

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.