Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux

The fresh feeling of a reinstall lasts for about a week.

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.

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

Then there's the cloud: "Oh, crap. I have a typo in a config file. I guess I'll destroy the machine and set up a whole new one!"

Reminds me, that I want to "fix" my install.

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.

I did this without having my distro broken. It was like "oh shiny, let me try this distro"

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.

Being able to easily and freely upgrade, experiment, and reinstall is one of the big perks of Linux. Carry on.

That’s how the pros do it.

Oh, for the days of constant distro-hopping ...

I’m on Unraid now and have most of my services migrated to docker containers but on my previous build, I was just running Ubuntu Server a majority of the time.

I got a little scared thinking about all of the manual configuration I’ve done over time to this build and knew that if I needed to reinstall I’d essentially be fucked.

Like what tf is a fstab again?

So I took a few hours to learn Ansible and wrote a playbook that could configure my build nearly 100% in just one click. Changed the game.

If anyone knows of something similar with Unraid configs let me know bc I really did enjoy the ansible process

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.

BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.

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.

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.