So, timeshift or NixOS?

For me it's installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.

LoL my current Gentoo system was installed like 12 years ago and moved on 5 different hardware platforms without a proper reinstall.

I have said myself to never peek in the /etc directory for any reason! 😅

I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?

I thought we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?

Reinstalling is Windows user logic. On Linux your supposed to fix things in place.

Not reinstalling the OS but instead booting a rescue disk and painstakingly fixing your mistake 😎

My Windows installation breaks and has to be installed every 9 months on average and its so fun

The beauty of Linux, you can not upgrade, or upgrade, migrate, or reinstall. You can script the install, so it's barebones+custom. Freedom is sweet.

reinstalling the os because im to lazy to clean the drives

Then there's me, reinstalling the OS because it's quicker than installing the three months' worth of updates I forgot about.

NixOS is great, you can even have it automatically reinstall and wipe your garbage with Impermanence lol

So am I the only one distro hopping for fun?

I actually do that. It forces me to backup the most necessary things and throw away the rest, hence making the OS feel cleaner.

NixOS.

I didn't reinstall my system for 5 years

Why would you reinstall NixOS, like, ever?

Heck even moving it to another partition isn't really a re-install as it'll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you'll have to move over /home manually, though).

And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc'ed the old stuff. It's practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it's installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.

Oh just one thing: Don't skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you'll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.

I never reinstall and always recover. Even when migrating from notebook to PC I just dd-ed it and fixed fstab. My current system is 5 years old :)

Reinstalling every 6 months to feel like new was Windows 95, 98, XP, etc

Remember the windows XP & HDD days when you would reinstall windows every new year so it ran smoother xd

Nixos is amazing just saying

stares at Debian Bookworm VPS that's been upgraded in-place and hasn't been reformatted since Debian Etch (2007)

I thought I was alone

Ah yes do the old snapper rollback of ZFS if that’s your bag baby

I did this with windows. Not so much macos until later versions started ballooning in size and being optimized for SSDs.

i haven't done that since i installed void linux. for some reason it just always "feels clean" to me

Fedora Silverblue enters the chat :) Haven't had a single hiccup so far. Only ublue spins are a pain in the butt imo. That's why I configure everything by myself.

But I need to try NixOs soon

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I reinstall on an estimated average of about monthly, distro hopping skewed that, it so should be around a bit less than bimonthly.

OSTree users: I have no such weaknesses

Clean install is more than feel safe. It is safe as it is a fresh start and will eliminate anything you missed that is not desirable.

dotbot and a list of apps

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I've been running the same installation since 2012.

obligatory: "arch, btw"