That is idiotic, there is absolutely a reason to reinstall in some cases
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.
And often the fastest option even lol
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.
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.
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.
Whaddya talking about I nuke my shit all the time.
Why learn nixOS, if not to reinstall every morning?
Yeah, that’s my issue, NixOS is so stable I never had to reinstall.
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”.
Until you find the answer on a Windows forum posted by some Indian dude performing unpaid labor.
Or the “don’t worry I fixed it” one time poster
“Just Google it,” they said. So, you Google it. You find one result. It’s a forum post. From you.
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 ╮(︶▽︶)╭
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
My distro hops have been more like distro evacuations.
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.
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.
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’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.
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.
I literally had an official support person tell me to reinstall Ubuntu to get a specific app running.
There are official support persons for Linux??
