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 me back when I disto hopped. Screwing something up was really just an excuse to try something new.
Now I’m I’m in a comfortable rut, but after recently having to set up a new machine from scratch NixOS is starting to look tempting.
Opensuse TW cured my distrohopping more than 1 year ago.
Nix is the only distro that’s tempting me…
Sorry just test it inside vms, or even install it in a partition that you can then delete. You can even try nix just by installing the package manager
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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
This was the way. Then you find Debian.
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.
I’m going to try Nix as my desktop OS. The only thing stopping me up until now is I like running the same OS that I run on servers (Debian). Do you think there’s a good use case for Nix on servers?
Yeah NixOS is great for servers, since you’re able to configure everything through the NixOS configs. Like if you want nginx you just add services.nginx.enable = true and similarly set the different virtualHosts and everything. That way your nginx configuration is stored in the same place as your system configuration, which can all be backed up with Git, and you can see everything running on your system and their configuration by just looking through your NixOS config.
That’s very interesting. I use ansible to maintain configuring on my Debian services. I guess there’d be no need when running Nix
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.
Cool you did backups
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.
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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.
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.
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 😉.
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 had that on my phone some ten years ago. Ah, the memories. It sucked, though.
Yeah, BTRFS sucked 10 years ago 😂. Try it now, it’s much more stable.
My favorite part of using Suse was Snapper.
My least favorite part was needing to use it every time they shipped a kernel update because it broke the Nvidia drivers. Eventually I just pinned my kernel version but it didn’t feel sustainable so I swapped back to Ubuntu, which at least in theory tests against the supported drivers. Ubuntu has its own issues so I’ll probably swap again next time my system needs surgery.
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).
Snapshots 4 life
Mhm, pretty much. I haven’t reinstalled since I started using snapshots.
I did this without having my distro broken. It was like “oh shiny, let me try this distro”
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.Yes, but recreation of any customization takes minutes if you use the correct distribution.
For example my root and home are on a tmpfs and therefore get deleted on every boot. Recreating every file in my system is done every boot, so reinstalling == booting (pretty much, partitioning is still manual).
(why do you do that, though?)
https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
When you regularly create and destroy a few dozen servers you care about reproducibility of installations and configurations. But even when you only have your home pc your drive can die at any point and you don’t want to figure out again how to fix that weird bug you once had or realize that you missed your docker images in your backup regimen.
If you nuke my pc from orbit I have it set up again in 10mins. Exactly. Every single file.
Comprehensible and respectable, even if it is on a level I cannot even think of reaching.
Heavy disagree… why pick between distros when you can build an environment unlike others, that fits your personal needs/wants.
One of the best parts about Linux is this freedom. If you don’t care about this freedom you should probably just be on windows. If you want something different in your Linux, alter it, don’t distro hop.
Idk. I think this only applies to power users or people who are willing to learn how to do things. If someone doesn’t want that, then distrohopping can be a convenient way to get a system you like more. And of course there’s also those that don’t care at all and just want something that works which shouldn’t stay on windows they should just use Linux Mint imo (there are many distros aimed at them and most are good but I would just recommend Mint csuse if you give them too much choice they won’t bother and stay on windows).
Basically I would just tell newbies “there’s 3 main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora (tho I guess the rpm one could also be openSUSE now given what’s happening with RHEL)), every other one is usually just a version of those 3 with different things preinstalled to make your life easier at the start.”
If a noob doesn’t want to get into the weeds but still is interested in say the arch community, I would aim them at Manjaro or a more friendly arch distro… If they want to get into the weeds, any distro + customization.
The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.
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!
