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
I am 5 years in, and that is still what I do most of the times
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
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
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.
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 .
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
This was the way. Then you find Debian.
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.
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!”
me running it on hyper v and reverting to a clean install snapshot the moment I write one command slightly wrong
Cool you did backups
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.
Being able to easily and freely upgrade, experiment, and reinstall is one of the big perks of Linux. Carry on.