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
Broke my ZorinOS install by trying to upgrade parts of the OS by myself so I could run newer software and lived like that for months until I gave up and switched to Fedora
BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.
I switched to BTRFS recently, but found myself even more fucked when my system stopped working suddenly and I didn’t know how to fix it without reformatting and installing grub again. Actually lost even more than I would have otherwise just because I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to get any form of recovery to work. That first EndeavourOS install didn’t last 2 months sadly.
Yep, everyone goes through that the first 2 or 3 installs, until you learn how CoW FSes work. It’s not like anything else and it takes a while to master it, but once you learn how to use it, you don’t reinstall ever again, just roll back snapshots 😉.
If you just want to get shit done sure just reinstall and you are good to go, but I see these issues as a learning opportunity and I have tons of free time so I try and fix my system for hours on end. Also it rarely breaks so not much time is wasted.
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.
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.
Literally this morning I started getting boot errors. It is telling me WBM can’t find the boot file. But I should be booting into grub, so idk what to do. My boot order is Ubuntu, then USB. And that’s it. And now I’m out of the house all day and can’t do anything but sweat about it.
You give that up that strategy and lean into fixing shit when you put the time in to customize the OS and desktop/window manager experience… at that point you should understand your system well enough to make fixing it easier, and you are also afraid of having to redo some of your customization. That being said, you still should make regular system backups, especially if you are tinkering with the OS experience a lot.
If you are afraid of redoing your customizations you are using the wrong distro.
It’s not about being afraid.
Customizing takes time and effort, which I’d rather use like.
Doing stuff?
Unless I want to re-customize it to be something else, I’d rather not re-make my entire set-up. I figured out what the relevant files were to how my whole set-up (DE look & behaviour, dotfiles for like
fishandnvim) and copied it all to a USB Drive that I just drop onto my home folder whenever I install my OS on a new computer.
I still think that’s a legitimate troubleshooting strategy. 😆
