• pascal@lemm.ee
    35·
    11 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
      4·
      11 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
        3·
        11 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.zoneქართული
          2·
          11 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
            1·
            11 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

    • OmegaII@feddit.nl
      1·
      11 months ago

      Fixing things in place in windows is a nightmare for the most part. Users are dumb fucks. Power users and admins are mostly the same. With a consequence that when you have a real obscure problem, there is no documentation by anyone anywhere. Certainly not microsoft with their posh ‘documentation’ that really doesn’t explain a thing.

      Doesn’t really help either that they change things with every minor update. And their basic structure is one big mess of mixed environments and totally diffferent visions. Let’s not even talk about their scripting language where nothing has standard behaviour.

      Ffs I hate microsoft. I’ve been managing that piece of shit for way too long.

  • Shatur@lemmy.ml
    9·
    11 months ago

    I never reinstall and always recover. Even when migrating from notebook to PC I just dd-ed it and fixed fstab. My current system is 5 years old :)

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
    81·
    11 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
      4·
      11 months ago

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

    • LucidDaemon@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 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.

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      11 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.

  • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    7·
    11 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
      6·
      11 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

  • dan@upvote.au
    7·
    11 months ago

    stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that’s been upgraded in-place and hasn’t been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)

      • dan@upvote.au
        1·
        11 months ago

        For this particular VPS, I’ve moved provider several times, but every time I just use Clonezilla to clone the disk over the internet. Maybe I should do a fresh reinstall one day. There’s just so much random stuff running on it though.

  • Asudox@lemmy.world
    81·
    11 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.

    • fl42v@lemmy.ml
      1·
      11 months ago

      Agreed in general, but I personally don’t reinstall it. My reason to do so was that I would randomly install some crap I needed for a few tasks and then forget about it, and with nixos it’s just nix shell or nix run nixpkgs#whatever, and then stuff’s gone with the next garbage collection.