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.

Oh, for the days of constant distro-hopping ...

That’s how the pros do it.

With the exception of my home data, this is why I switched to Fedora Silverblue. I got past the experimental phase and just wanted a linux that would work without thoughts

can't say I've ever done this. better to figure out why it's broken and fix it so that the next time I encounter that kinda problem, I can fix it quickly.

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

I feel this. I used to do it all the time when I first got into Linux. Immutable distros will make this a non-issue.

This is the way

Reinstalling is Windows (and sometimes macOS) logic. On Linux just fix whatever it is and move on.

Hey, at least we have the option to fix things. My poor Windows friends end up reinstalling multiple times a year due to unfixable issues and bugs.

This is precisely the hampster wheel that felt like it led me to osx.

Considering I'd rather not spend the weekend troubleshooting stuff when I have my house to clean before returning to work on Monday, and a simple backup > reinstall will take me less than 6h at most (counting all customization and etc), I'll take a full reinstall any time.

Edit: Oh, now I reread that's about the early days. Would do the same though.

Have a friend who still does this. Every so often he'll notice that something is missing from a previous reinstall and we have to take a second to bring his system back on track

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Used to end up doing that like once a month.