Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux

Backup. Fuck it. Learn . Fix. Repeat ad nauseam .

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

Honesty just make /home a different partition.

Has saved me so much trouble in changing distros on my laptop.

I’ve settled pretty well on Fedora at this point but that’ll probably change at some point (mostly because I don’t like Ubuntu much and I work in a mostly RHEL shop)

BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.

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

This was me back when I disto hopped. Screwing something up was really just an excuse to try something new.

Now I'm I'm in a comfortable rut, but after recently having to set up a new machine from scratch NixOS is starting to look tempting.

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!"

I switch distro once I start feeling that my current installation is too bloated and requires a heavy cleaning

Which is why I switched to nixos, so that I can’t bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about

The Windows way.

Early days? I do this even today if I don't have enough skills to fix it.

Since getting a NAS I now think of everything else as volatile storage

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

I use timeshift and it has saved my ass quite a few times!

Used to end up doing that like once a month.

I haven't properly dotfilesed all of my rice yet, so I'm just hoping l don't break something until I get that sorted.

mostly happens with Ubuntu. i don't know if iam built to crash it but i always tend to break it. i have been using fedora nobara for the last couple of month and i didn't break it once

This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.

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 ...

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.

This is still the way! Gives me an excuse to change my distro.

It didn't happen THAT often before, but as a previous Windows user and restore point fan, Timeshift was a game changer. Don't have to tread lightly anymore. :D

I don't have many spare devices to do backups so I started using Fedora Kionite. I highly recommend installing ublue if anyone uses Silverblue/Kionite.

earlier days? this was me last week after failing miserably to install poetry 4 times in a row and destroying my python environment.

Me rn frfr

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

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.

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

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.

As a noob, I wonder what would be the right way to do it?

When I decided to switch to Fedora, I wanted a safety net. I had a 500GB SSD, so I bought an additional 2TB SSD, so I could make full disk image backups and be able to store 3 of them (I used full disk encryption, so my disk image backups were the full 500GB). And I dutifully made backups, either monthly, before I made a big change, or before a major update. Been doing this for nearly two years now and I haven't used a single backup image even once. It's almost disappointing, in a perverse sort of way. I was looking forward to having to learn stuff by fixing things that break, but nothing ever does!

Now I just run suse tumbleweed with snapshots and if anything breaks I just recover from snapshot.

me whose samsung laptop will only reliably boot with kubuntu:
:(

This was me back in the days when breaking anything xorg related

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.