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".
Ehhh all my important files are sync'd to my NAS. I have a script that just apt installs everything I normally use. Sometimes it's just faster than troubleshooting. Usually if I'm about to do something whacky I clone my disk and use the clone. If it works it's my new primary, if it doesn't nothing lost.
idk but if my system becomes unbootable, i'd reinstall. Otherwise, set up a NAS for yourself and upload snapshots to it, configure this process to be automatic. Especially if you like to tinker with your system or/and you use a rolling release
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.
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
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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.
Uh... I don't have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.
Sometimes I love trawling through logs at speed and making magic happen because it reminds me of my heydays solving L3 support issues when the shit hit the fan.
As someone I'd still consider a noob, I did this less than a month after getting a new laptop last January. I probably broke something trying to get the headphone jack working on it and then Bluetooth stopped working properly as well after installing Steam, so I started over. All I know for certain is I ended up destroying a folder I shouldn't have on accident, which bricked the system pretty much and made nothing launchable, terminal included. This was on MX and haven't had issues since reinstalling.
It's kind of a moot point now, but I've definitely been keeping snapshops from timeshift just in case I truly break something and can't fix it, like the time I somehow nearly bricked Plasma by just trying to install virtualbox.
One of the big selling points of Linux to me was I can automate my install from end to end. I haven't bothered automating the installer, but once it boots I run a playbook to set everything up and restore most of my homedir from backup. Everything down to setting my custom keyboard shorts, extensions and wallpaper is covered.
These days I run Silverblue and I'm trying to find the time to put together my own build pipeline to build my own images on top of Silverblue's.