I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must go⊠except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldnât let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well Iâm pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
Thatâs one thing I donât like about modern Linux is how it names network interfaces.
I miss the old eth0,1,3 or wlan0,1,2 etc.
Glad to hear of this success story, never reinstall a perfectly crafted OS!
Around 2007 I had a Windows laptop die on me and drove me to device agnosticism. Maybe I learned the wrong lesson but now I keep my OS and data separate enough that a b0rked OS is an hourâs inconvenience instead of a dayâs recovery.
Still, itâs pretty awesome that you can just shuck a drive into a totally new machine and only have to adjust network settings.
linux is boring
now.
FTFY :)
I once put an HDD into a completely new machine with all new hardware (same architecture, though), and it booted without any issues whatsoever. Must be 15-20 years ago but I still remember the new machine.
Linux always was exceptionally great when it comes to hardware changes after installation.
Advanced windows users are going to be checking you out
Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old ⊠Skylake seems recent to me and thatâs the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.
I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because thatâs how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. Itâs only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their âtrusted computingâ bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.
Me either. My longest install is about to turn 5, but thatâs an OpenBSD closet laptop server that gets upgraded remotely with every release.
Iâm doing okay on this laptop; just hit 1 year on bookworm. But Iâm also bandwidth constrained (kilo-bits per second) and canât really distrohop like I used to.
