I’m still pretty new to Linux so I break stuff pretty often, like recently I was trying to get opencl working with my amd gpu and I ended up causing every video I played to stutter constantly.
And I’ve been trying out new software to control fans or rgb and following guides making me enter commands until I figure out something that works I note it down so when I do a fresh install again I can easily configure it without all the trial and error etc and install only the software I found that I liked
That kinda makes sense at this stage. If you spend time understanding what those commands do, you’d understand how the system works, and most importantly how to not fuck it up. Keep in mind there’s a lot of misinformation and bad practices in guides out there. People who bare know more than you feel confident to share snippets without warning. Ten or twenty years ago much fewer people had experience with Linux and most people confident enough to write were technical people that knew what they were talking about. Destructive misinformation was less.
But yeah when you learn, the need or urge to reinstall disappears. I stopped reinstalling in 2014. Took me 9 years to unfuck my Windows brain and understand enough to not shoot myself in the feet. Main machine hasn’t been reinstalled since then. That’s with replacing multiple main boards, switching AMD > Intel > AMD, changing SSDs, going from single SSD to mdraid, increasing in size over time, etc.
So now I’m curious what distro you like most? I’ve been using popos for about a year at this point then tried fedora for about a week and now installed arch to feel around
The machine that was last installed in 2014 is Ubuntu LTS. It’s been upgraded through all the LTS releases since then. Currently on 22.04 with the free Ubuntu Pro enabled. I use a mix of Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable on other machines. For example my laptop is on Debian 12. Debian has been the most reliable OS and community for over 30 years and I believe it’ll still be around 30 years from now, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves. 😂
I usually keep important stuff on my server but things like games and stuff I purge with the fresh install and just download the games I’m actively playing, also helps clear up any issues from installing random junk during the months between as I settle on what programs I like
That’s when you know it’s time for a fresh install
Nah, in a rolling distro it’s normal, they were mostly unused stuff hide in /home, and useless yay pkg.
Sir, this is not Windows.
I’m still pretty new to Linux so I break stuff pretty often, like recently I was trying to get opencl working with my amd gpu and I ended up causing every video I played to stutter constantly.
And I’ve been trying out new software to control fans or rgb and following guides making me enter commands until I figure out something that works I note it down so when I do a fresh install again I can easily configure it without all the trial and error etc and install only the software I found that I liked
That plus distro hopping
That kinda makes sense at this stage. If you spend time understanding what those commands do, you’d understand how the system works, and most importantly how to not fuck it up. Keep in mind there’s a lot of misinformation and bad practices in guides out there. People who bare know more than you feel confident to share snippets without warning. Ten or twenty years ago much fewer people had experience with Linux and most people confident enough to write were technical people that knew what they were talking about. Destructive misinformation was less.
But yeah when you learn, the need or urge to reinstall disappears. I stopped reinstalling in 2014. Took me 9 years to unfuck my Windows brain and understand enough to not shoot myself in the feet. Main machine hasn’t been reinstalled since then. That’s with replacing multiple main boards, switching AMD > Intel > AMD, changing SSDs, going from single SSD to mdraid, increasing in size over time, etc.
So now I’m curious what distro you like most? I’ve been using popos for about a year at this point then tried fedora for about a week and now installed arch to feel around
The machine that was last installed in 2014 is Ubuntu LTS. It’s been upgraded through all the LTS releases since then. Currently on 22.04 with the free Ubuntu Pro enabled. I use a mix of Ubuntu LTS and Debian stable on other machines. For example my laptop is on Debian 12. Debian has been the most reliable OS and community for over 30 years and I believe it’ll still be around 30 years from now, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves. 😂
Do you delete all your files on a reinstall? Documents, photos, videos, games?
Separate partitions for / and /home, save all your data, configs, etc. but you can still distrohop!
I usually keep important stuff on my server but things like games and stuff I purge with the fresh install and just download the games I’m actively playing, also helps clear up any issues from installing random junk during the months between as I settle on what programs I like