there goes another afternoon

Signed,

Windows users

ow, my [registry keys]
- I question who these imaginary windows users are.
  
  I set up Windows for my parents. The biggest challenges is them not not knowing how to log into their email. Every 2-3 years, I move their stuff to the cloud and throw in a fresh Windows. Did that for 15 years. Not once did I have to mess with any weird settings for them.
  
  During the pandemic, hating windows 11, I switched them over to linux. Every month, there's a new problem. Audio stopped working. Had some DNS issues (that required me to zoom call my brother) They did some weird things where they downloaded two Google chromes (?). I'd have to run updates manually because I don't trust them to open up terminal.
  
  Already Linux for my parents requires more support than anything else.
  
  I still plan to keep encouraging them to use Linux, because I really don't like the new WIn11 updates.

I did that as a beginner a few times but now I'm able to resolve everything I need to with the good old terminal.

sometimes i just cant be bothered figuring out why systemd isnt starting a graphical interface, or whatever, and reinstalling doesnt take very long if you have a home partition
- Figuring out? It's right there in the logs.
  
  Fast disks are spoiling the next generation. Back in the day, 2 minutes reading could save you half an hour of reinstalling. But if reinstalling takes about the same amount of time, I guess there's no more incentive to actually learn something.
- You done use anything but the base system install? No extra software? Are you okay?
I am new to desktop linux. It is a pain to not know certain troubleshooting steps as I do mostly for server linux.

For example, not knowing what the gui consists of, which applications are essential and which are not.
- In that case I would like to recommend you install Arch at least once. Not to actually use in production, but it made a lot of things click for me that help me with server stuff too. Just follow along with the install guide on the wiki inside of a VM.
  
  If you really want to know what applications are essential I'd install a window manager and not just install the gnome package. Though even just installing your favourite DE will work fine.
  
  I've heard other people recommend Gentoo and Linux from scratch as well for this purpose since they go even deeper, but that may be too much to start off with and I haven't done that myself
- I feel this, especially the GUI/Desktop essential stuff, and I have been daily driving Linux on desktop for about 8 years now.
  
  Going from Debian with Mate to Arch with AwesomeWM (minimal tiled window manager), there is a lot you actually need to know and it's convoluted how it interacts with each other, a lot of it is thru dbus but some things go thru env variables - .xprofile, .profile, bashrc/zshrc, pam_env.
  
  Yesterday I found out I am actually not running any gui polkit agents - I had it installed (possibly for years) but the .deskop file had OnlyShowIn=Xfce so Dex didn't autostart it.
  
  Sometimes I do feel like I am just making my life harder for no reason but I love the minimal UI and kb navigation.
The real terminal fun comes from accidentally entering grub's rescue mode when you fuck the config up, and then having to frantically remember how to boot linux manually
- I'm just glad I have more than one device with internet access in my home. The one time a vm update was pushed to desktop users on Linux Mint, killing the desktop for anyone who got the update. I had to use my phone to find out what how to restore my pc.
- Uh oh... hd0.. insmod something ??? Chainload..er...?

Haven't reinstalled a distro in probably a decade.

Same. And I never fucking will. I will learn how to fix it if it kills me.
The last time I reinstalled a distro to fix an issue was Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
- aw, you got better :)
Throw away system

Buy new one

First install!
- Discard computer. Return to monke
What distro?

Are you hiring? If not, are you mentoring?

I make a great [food]!

Or have you just been stuck using Windows for the past ten years?
Have done the same with Windows.

Only on new systems, or on systems not owned by me.

Cannot relate to that. I modify the crap out of my Arch install and keep it in perfect condition all the time.

7 years strong here with only 1 reinstall to switch to 64 bit
- Same as my Windows installs.
- 2 reinstalls now* I had to upgrade my NVME drive and the old one shit the bed while I was moving data, so everything on this system is fresh now.... At least I keep the important stuff backed up in git haha
I was definitely scared if Arch before trying it. Seemed like the general consensus was that it wasn't a matter of if Arch would break, but when. I heard that updating everything will eventually break the system. Well, I figured, I'd like to try it just to see. I haven't had a single problem and it's the setup I'm most proud of l, having spent the most amount of time building it up to exactly how I like it.

Who made this, a windows user? Friggin meme is backwards

I really had to chuckle when reading the comments.

Linux broke, had to reinstall: -"we do this in bussiness too!"

Windows broke. had to reinstall: -"LOL! Shitty Windows, install Linux!"
- Makes me curious, can you have a Windows image leading you to work without any interaction? (e.g no activation, mounted data partition, etc)

my current install is 3 yrs old, if you select a decent distro and dont fuck with its internals it works pretty well.

i suspect most of the people complaining are either on a meme distro or they poke too much into the system

You seem to implying that doing anything other than using preinstalled apps like the web browser is "poking too much into the system" and are therefore idiots. As I have had a system break just by installing or upgrading packages on Ubuntu. Now I always use ZFS on root and make snapshots of everything beforehand.
- I installed Ubuntu on my desktop I wasn't using for a while, then had to wipe it again a couple hours later after I seemingly bricked my OS installing a package necessary to run AppImages, except it uninstalled some pretty critical shit
What would you suggest is a meme distro, I'm using endeavour os, it is imo perfection almost.

Whatever distribution I tried something didn't work or failed to boot
meme distro

Which distros are "meme distros"?
- I don't know what they meant by "meme distros", but I can say that the thing that immediately comes to mind is TempleOS.

Reinstalling is the Windows way of solving problems.

Additionally, going full Linux and then trying to install Windows again is a nightmare (but I guess that's not really what we're talking about here).
- I learned the hard way to never trust windows to not destroy other disks. One time it decided to place the boot partition on a disk it saw having a unknown file system. Turns out it was a disk on a raid-array. After that I physically unpower all other disks before installing windows.

The only time I've ever done this on Linux was 20 years ago, trying to f with XF86 before I understood it.

I reinstall on every boot...

I reinstall every hour via cronjob
Just see your systems as cattle, not pets. That way you can do this. Usually done through infrastructure as code like Ansible. NixOs is perfect for this use case
- Love nix
This is the way
Me too!

I mean, who doesn't use snapshots these days? BTRFS / ZFS has saved me days of grief.

As an Arch user, BTRFS has saved me SO much pain, suffering, and time. BTRFS is a LIFESAVER!
- Just the other day I was experimenting with making my own AUR package and blew away my /bin….. snapper is good I like snapper

You need to rethink your reinstall process. My root is on a separate drive from my home directory. My home directory has a script that installs all of my basic software, along with any specific config files that don't reside in my home directory naturally. I can reinstall the system in about an hour.

Yeah, I use NixOS so my whole system is defined in a couple config files, so when reinstalling I can just point the installer at my config and get (pretty much) the exact same system. Same packages, git config, aliases, package versions, firewall rules, kernel version, etc, only thing missing is a couple dotfiles I haven't switched over yet but those are synced using Syncthing anyways.
This is basically what I used to do with Windows before I switched. All my document, picture, videos, music links pointed to my storage drive and I had a ninite installer with all my required programs ready to go. Plus my barebones microsoft account I used to save all my Windows settings so they just loaded right up when logging in after the new install.

Do you have/know of a guide to pull this kind of thing off on Mint?
- I used to use Ninite, but Chocolatey has so many more packages. These days I only have to export my package list to a file, reinstall windows, install chocolatey and install the packages by importing the file. That just leaves my favourite debloat script, some light setting changes and maybe the one or two programs that aren't on Chocolatey
- Honestly, unfortunately no. I've been doing this since before Redhat split off Fedora. All my scripts are custom. I just rewrite them as new distros are released.

Surprising to me so I must do some things right :

dedicated /home partition
OS on SSD, new OS on fast USB stick
backup on another physical disk of important data (usually a subset of /home )
other partition for OS testing
other working device for instructions and search online (mobile phone is usually enough)
documented setup for complex tools, e.g /home/Prototypes where you might have container setups, e.g docker-compose.yml

Usually if you have this in place its a matter of hour, at most. Sure in 1h you will not have ALL the apps you need perfectly configured but, for me at least, enough to feel at "home" again. It's usually about having ~/.bashrc or ~/.tridactilrc in place but if you do have /home on another partition, it's basically "free".

I have only really done this while i used windows, on linux i have always been able to find a solution that didn't require reinstalling; on windows on the other hand i had a time where it just started to bluescreen at every boot out of nowhere...

Meanwhile I've had Linux distros just completely bork themselves 20 minutes after install. Or during an update. Or while running a terminal command, because the "friendly" Linux community refused to give me GUI instructions, or simply explain what the command did.
- They should explain what the commands do. Nobody should be blindly copy-pasting commands into their terminal.
  
  Also, consider the source. Advice you get from Stack Overflow is going to be better than what you get from some random you DMed who said they were a "Linux ninja".

i only reinstall when it's a hard to fix issue and i wanted to try out another distro anyway, so about 0.8distrohops/year

I scored a bunch of used SSDs from my old work that were out in the dumpster. Company was fine with tech dumpster diving back then. Now I can do full installs and really see what they do on my potato :)

It is normal for a beginner to only have 1 tool in their debugging toolbox 🤷‍♂️

Git good and solve the problems you create.

Goddammit I'm literally right now trying to decide if I want to spend an entire day wiping and reinstalling the OS in my main PC or if I can live with the current glitches for now. Full disclosure, in my case the glitchy behaviour is entirely on me trying to tinker with the OS and accidentally breaking stuff, not an issue with Linux or the distro.

its worth it i would say
Without hesitation I will always recommend reinstalling the os I have it down to a fucking science haha

this is also the go to in any buisness env, wipe and reimage

yep. not worth the troubleshooting time when you can pull a brand new image from the servers in about 5 minutes, especially when it ties into a file server so you don't have to worry about lost data.

Fixing a small bug, then reinstall everything...

So true, I just had a bug and after reinstalling I go to find out it was just a driver issue. Screw nivdia.

wiping my entire system once every 6 months or something because it just feels faster and "fresher"

yeah lol same, even though i still install all the bloat (in a justworks distro)

When you install, partition your drive. /home goes on its own partition and will probably be the largest one. Then you can wipe the / partition and reinstall all you want, takes 15 minutes

If you've done any weird customisations you may want to make a ba k up of /etc . I wouldn't recommend blindly restoring /etc , but at least you'll have a record of the system configs, should you need to redo stuff post reinstall.

Snapshots

Did that just last week. Managed to break my system after an upgrade. I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot it, so I just wiped everything.

Most average arch user experience

So you're saying that Arch Linux is in fact Win98, got it!

I recently fucked a system because I wanted to resize the swap partition. Started throwing time after trying to recover. Realized that even if I succeeded, I'd have spent more time recovering than it would take to reestablish a new system, and no important data was on the system.

I have some Linux servers in hyper v virtual machines and i just revert then to a previous snapshot if I mess anything up instead of bothering with diagnosing what I did 🙃

I guess the "small bug" is that you have microsoft windows on the drive for dual booting. Otherwise I wouldn't know what sort of bug you'd get rid of like this.

literally about to do this today. Ubuntu->Fedora

Haven't needed to do either yet since I started using #EndeavourOS. I'm a bit surprised, given how many posts I've seen about people bricking their Arch installs.

People who use arch tend to wonder how other people manage to break arch so hard and often. At least that's been my experience since I started using arch.
- Yeah I've been on it a solid 5-6 months and the only issue I had was on initial setup I forgot NetworkManager or lost it somehow. That was literally the only issue. Been less issues than Windows since.

I just blame it on being a rolling release ;)

nixOS. But seriously. You can change something in the config file, and if it doesn't work, you can roll back to a previous file. It can also control for things like custom kernels.

Me when i cant get rid of some weird dependencies.

Thought it was just me.