• pascal@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    LoL my current Gentoo system was installed like 12 years ago and moved on 5 different hardware platforms without a proper reinstall.

    I have said myself to never peek in the /etc directory for any reason! 😅

    • Case@lemmynsfw.com
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      8 months ago

      I know a little linux, but obviously I’m still learning. I’ve picked up everything I know on my own, for the most part - internet guides from the linux community tend to be pretty solid, and I know enough to not totally FUBAR my system.

      Is there a listing of standard linux directories and what they’re for? Lite /etc, things like that. Because I seem to find bits of different stuff in a variety of directories.

      I’ve recently moved to linux on my gaming rig, which is my daily driver - that being said, it is mainly for gaming. Anything can surf the web or play videos and shit, for the most part.

      • brakenium@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Who cares with storage nowadays? I just use filelight or command line based tools to determine big storage hogs when I need to

        • TheOPtimal@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          8 months ago

          I just mean, do you ever get scared of showing hidden files in your hone directory? My install isn’t even a year old, and I do.

          • brakenium@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            I just scroll past those. I have set my XDG dirs which helps. If I were to reinstall it would be back once I have everything I need

    • HEISENBERG@lemmy.worldOPM
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      8 months ago

      I have a USB drive bay. Just swap disks to play around with other distros. It’s pretty neat too

    • TheWoozy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I installed ubuntu on my workstation in 2013 and have upgraded the OS since. I’ve swapped out the motherboard and added 5 drives in raid6. The thing morphed from a desktop into a server over the years. The only original HW is the case (power supply died a few years ago). I never really concidered wiping & installing a new OS.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?

    • Hexarei@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.

      Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.

    • kshade@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You don’t have to do this, I manage some machines that haven’t been reinstalled for over a decade. It’s really just because “it feels cleaner”, I guess.

    • Rolder@reddthat.com
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      8 months ago

      Whose doing it every year with Windows? I’ve had it for years and only reinstalled once when I got a bunch of new hardware

      • TwanHE@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I reinstall about every 6 months, or whenever there is a big feature update. It’s rather noticeable when running benchmarks that performance drops over time mostly 0.1% lows.

        Especially when running a stripped install, Microsoft somehow always finds a way to enable shit again or reinstall bloat with updates.

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Realistically you don’t have to if you’re not constantly tinkering, but if you’re changing a lot of low-level stuff without knowing what you’re doing, you have the ability to break things. If you don’t know how to fix them, then it’s easier to just reformat. Basically it’s a skill issue lol.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything… at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I’ve used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.

      PS: now that I think about it I’ve never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling… call me crazy?

  • Sunrosa@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    My Windows installation breaks and has to be installed every 9 months on average and its so fun

    • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      8 months ago

      Reinstalling Windows hasn’t been fun since Windows 7. The OS already has most drivers and automatically downloads everything else, I miss skimming through pages of drivers to find the correct one.

      • Jeknilah@monero.town
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        8 months ago

        You’re telling me that making a Microsoft account isn’t fun? It’s truly a process I look forward to. Cortana is literally the friendliest AI waifu assistant I could ever ask for, how can I say no when she asks me to give up my privacy?

        • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com
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          8 months ago

          Creating a Microsoft account is as easy as “next next done”, where’s the fun in that?.

          Cortana was great on Windows Phone (mostly because I love Jen Taylor’s voice), but they kept taking away features and was basically useless on the desktop which, imho, has no use for an assistant.

    • plague-sapiens@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Been there, started scripting with PowerShell to have an after-setup-script to change reg entries, install tools (mostly through choco), run them (like dism++ cleanup and o&o shutup10 privacy tweaks) and migrate data from backups. Setting up and migrating took me usually 3-4h of work, sometimes more. With the scripts it’s just: Install Windows, update, reboot, update, reboot, run the script, reboot. Done. It’s like 30min of work.

      Good thing I changed to linux, cause you can automate the whole process and preseed it into a debian image or kickstart rpm-based distros. It’s possible to do customized Windows images too. I have tried a lot of times. It never worked like it was supposed to.

  • badbytes@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The beauty of Linux, you can not upgrade, or upgrade, migrate, or reinstall. You can script the install, so it’s barebones+custom. Freedom is sweet.

  • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyz
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    8 months ago

    Then there’s me, reinstalling the OS because it’s quicker than installing the three months’ worth of updates I forgot about.

    • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      The main downside to a rolling release distro, with that much drift there’s a good chance something will install that conflicts with something else, and nobody can really help because the only real way to replicate your install is to go back in time and do the same thing

      • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        YMMV based on distro. IIRC OpenSUSE has upgrade “pathing” to reduce conflicts during long delays between updates. Geckolinux has an iso released 6 months ago and it will update to the latest OpenSUSE packages.

        I honestly think Arch could handle 3 months as well as long as you update the keyring and read the update news from Arch.

        NixOS rolling wouldn’t give a damn but that’s not really fair since it basically rebuilds the whole system :P

        The biggest issue is not getting security updates for 3 months.

  • Asudox@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I actually do that. It forces me to backup the most necessary things and throw away the rest, hence making the OS feel cleaner.

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Why would you reinstall NixOS, like, ever?

    Heck even moving it to another partition isn’t really a re-install as it’ll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you’ll have to move over /home manually, though).

    And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc’ed the old stuff. It’s practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it’s installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.

    Oh just one thing: Don’t skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you’ll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.

    • dmrzl@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, depending on your definition of reinstall you either reinstall NixOS never or on every boot. There’s no in-between.

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it’s probably more stable these days.

    • LucidDaemon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It’s a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.

  • feef@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Remember the windows XP & HDD days when you would reinstall windows every new year so it ran smoother xd