In the olden days, I would have spent hours to fix it, completely forget everything I've done over the course of those several hours and then having to reinstall it bcs I've broken something else in those unsuccessful attempts and now dont have the energy to figure out this clusterfuck too.
Got into an argument about this once. The other person insisted that if I wipe my hard drive and reinstall, that I’m a pathetic moron who doesn’t deserve to use a computer.
In fairness, it’s usually better to fix things so you can learn, but dang they were toxic.
You learn plenty by breaking and reinstalling. I don't considering it an invalid option for a home user. I had to reinstall MacOS7/8 and Windows 95/98 so many times as a kid. Learned a lot doing it, sysadmin now 🤷♂️
Second approach is better as it teaches you to fix and understand the system you're working with
Of course, this is a more complicated and energy - demanding approach, though. But if you wanna stay on Linux, you better figure such stuff out, this will be invaluable in the long run.
I should also mention that Debian, despite the Bookworm introducing more user-friendly options, is not a newbie-centered distribution and fixing things in there tend to be more tedious for an inexperienced user.
The upside, however, is that once you've set it up, everything will just work. But first you might face some pain.
My laptop's mic seems to have some contact issues. It never worked for a second on windows. I put Linux on it, and it usually just works. When it doesn't, some percussive maintenance does a quick job of fixing it. I guess I was dealt the opposite hand than usual.
Yesterday I tried to format and encrypt a usb drive, accidentally encrypted the main drive and it wouldn't boot to a snapshot before that. Decided to go for EndevourOS (Arch BTW) instead of Tumbleweed because I found Tumbleweeds installer too complicated.
My wifi card just stops working after a resume from suspend. I cannot get it to come back after resume. After some time fucking with it, I just turned off suspend. And turned on close lid = power down. EZ.
It's funny seeing this like literally a couple days after I decided it would be easier to reinstall my Mint sysyem than to fix the audio issues Pipewire was causing. I'm back on PulseAudio and haven't had issues since.
I just learned yesterday, that you have to switch vulkan packages (including lib32 version) if you switch to proprietary nvidia driver 😂 only to learn that I don’t have enough RAM for cyberpunk, after it finally started..
How about NixOS where the OS automatically installs the correct software and chooses the right settings. Then you have the time fiddle on your config for hours 🌈
Re-installs are for scrubs windows users. We don't do that here. SSH from other machine, chroot from live usb, switch to TTY or even UEFI interactive shell. Fix your shit, and get to understand how it works while at it.