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
This was the way. Then you find Debian.
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I work with linux daily, work in IT. Often I just do this as well. Aint got time and energy to fix something while a reinstall takes a fraction of the time
I switch distro once I start feeling that my current installation is too bloated and requires a heavy cleaning
Which is why I switched to nixos, so that I can’t bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about
NixOS is so incredibly stable it’s crazy. Even if my entire computer implodes I can just download my couple config files off github and get exactly the same system on a different computer.
Well, you still need to backup and restore your persistent drive, but that’s trivial too.
Yeah, I use Impermanence and all my important things and dotfiles are synced between my devices. Other stuff is just games and stuff I can reinstall anytime.
I reinstalled Linux when it crashes, or used Timeshift for years, but at this time I learned totally nothing.
Then I tried Arch manual installation, and it changes my mind.
Cool you did backups
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like “oh shiny, let me try this distro”
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.
Snapshots 4 life
Mhm, pretty much. I haven’t reinstalled since I started using snapshots.
Yup. Being able to run my home and root(s) in separate subvolumes, and simply booting into a specific root with a kernel parameter… 😌
I’ve lost so much data to btrfs disk mirrors. Zfs is my friend now.
Meeh, anything that is CoW and has snapshots will do the job, ZFS or BTRFS, whatever rocks your boat 🤷.
I agree cow + snapshot is pretty useful. I would just never use btrfs for data I care about. There is a reason no one sane runs it in production. Your computer and data do what you want 😊🙂😊.
It’s being used in Meta 🤨… in production.
Cool I had no idea. I like zstd from them. I don’t really want to argue if it works for you that’s great. I’ve seen so many problems with corruption that I wouldn’t recommend it. I guess I’ll give it another try in a VM some day. I really tried to move to it before migrating back to zfs land. I do recall the send and receive working pretty flawlessly. Also was a huge fan of duperemove.
Do you know if it has support for something like zvols yet?
Yes, it did have problems a few years ago, especially regarding RAIDs, but it’s improved a lot since then. RAID5 still sucks though 😁… but I read the problem is finally been worked on (haven’t checked code, I read about it in a sub on reddit).
No, it doesn’t have something like zvol, it has the regular subvolumes (pools in ZFS) and you can assign quotas, the same as in ZFS. But, to represent itself as separate block device, no. And I don’t think this is something that’s planned, though I could be wrong (as I said, I haven’t looked at their git in ages).
When I decided to switch to Fedora, I wanted a safety net. I had a 500GB SSD, so I bought an additional 2TB SSD, so I could make full disk image backups and be able to store 3 of them (I used full disk encryption, so my disk image backups were the full 500GB). And I dutifully made backups, either monthly, before I made a big change, or before a major update. Been doing this for nearly two years now and I haven’t used a single backup image even once. It’s almost disappointing, in a perverse sort of way. I was looking forward to having to learn stuff by fixing things that break, but nothing ever does!
Honesty just make /home a different partition.
Has saved me so much trouble in changing distros on my laptop.
I’ve settled pretty well on Fedora at this point but that’ll probably change at some point (mostly because I don’t like Ubuntu much and I work in a mostly RHEL shop)
This is exactly what I have done on my personal installs. Saves so much time when there is a problem or when you just feel like distro hopping.
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Do a snapshot and roll back. Actually faster and easier.
This was in the long long ago, grasshopper. We did bare metal installations back in the day.
Assuming you can pinpoint the moment things went all fucky
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.
If you have a separate /home and backed up your data… well why shouldn’t I?
