That is idiotic, there is absolutely a reason to reinstall in some cases
Tbf “funny” is, by nature, subjective. Something may be funny to others but not to you, just as you may like onions while I may not, or I may find Shakira attractive while you may not, or I may be into pokemon but you may not, etc.
So, jokes are supposed to be funny, to someone, but you’re not necessarily that “someone.”
With the way most distros are structured, you should never need a reinstall, since reinstalling the packages will fix any issues with broken system files. Broken configuration wouldn’t be as easy to fix, but still something you should be able to fix.
The only reason to be reinstalling, in my eyes, is if you have a mess of packages and configuration you don’t remember, and want to get a clean slate to reconfigure instead of trying to figure out why everything was set up in a certain way.
As an IT guy who has worked professionally as a Linux sysadmin.
While you are correct, the factor you are missing is time.
There have been countless times I have reinstalled Linux machines because it is faster than troubleshooting the issue
Fair, but machines at work as sysadmin are a different thing - hopefully there you’re also dealing with fast deployment, prepared ahead of time. But if the issue is that you messed something up on your own computer, ignoring the issue in favor of reinstalling sounds likely to leave you oblivious to what the issue was, and likely to repeat your mistake.
Unless the drive gets corrupted or infected with malware, you can just load a previous snapshot. That’s much faster and easier than reinstalling.
Btrfs has snapshots. They can be created instantly and don’t use any extra space until the files are changed.
I reinstall at the drop of a hat. Pretty much any excuse to try another distro or configuration I was uncertain about.
The whole point of doing a separate partition for your home directory is to do just that… The fuck is this even supposed to mean.
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again. So, no, it’s only productive if you are in a fucked-up environment where changes bring more breakage than they fix.
It’s useful if you don’t plan to do the same thing again, though. So if you are just trying random stuff, yeah, go ahead.
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again
Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).
For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.
Try Root on ZFS.
If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.
Uh… I don’t have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.
That’s fair. I chose ZFS because I’ve used it before. And understand it fairly well already. I know nothing about BTRFS, so perhaps you could educate me a little. I’m working on setting up a cloudstack host using ZFS RAID 10. Does BTRFS have a flexible architecture to where you could do something similar?
Edit: Perhaps you could also inform me of the speeds of BTRFS too. From what I understand, ZFS outperforms BTRFS in large datasets, but I don’t know where the cutoff is. I’ll let you know it would need to run 12 ea 10TB HDDs.
Nah, reinstall goes brrrr whenever you run into an issue
If the issue doesn’t resolve itself, reinstall, that works for me as a catch all solution because I use Linux like a Chromebook, web browsing.
