The main downside to a rolling release distro, with that much drift there’s a good chance something will install that conflicts with something else, and nobody can really help because the only real way to replicate your install is to go back in time and do the same thing
YMMV based on distro. IIRC OpenSUSE has upgrade “pathing” to reduce conflicts during long delays between updates. Geckolinux has an iso released 6 months ago and it will update to the latest OpenSUSE packages.
I honestly think Arch could handle 3 months as well as long as you update the keyring and read the update news from Arch.
NixOS rolling wouldn’t give a damn but that’s not really fair since it basically rebuilds the whole system :P
The biggest issue is not getting security updates for 3 months.
You don’t have to do this, I manage some machines that haven’t been reinstalled for over a decade. It’s really just because “it feels cleaner”, I guess.
I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.
Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.
I have 3 clones of my 10yo Manjaro desktop install running on other hardware around my network, including a Proxmox VM. It just jumps across, fires up and I fix the hostname, good to go.
Cloning a base image and creating VMs from it is one of the coolest things. I do it for my VMs on my Proxmox cluster any time i need a new server for something - and yeah just copying my dev desktop to my new laptop for going to a conference was such a great way to avoid hours of setup
It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything… at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I’ve used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.
PS: now that I think about it I’ve never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling… call me crazy?
I reinstall about every 6 months, or whenever there is a big feature update. It’s rather noticeable when running benchmarks that performance drops over time mostly 0.1% lows.
Especially when running a stripped install, Microsoft somehow always finds a way to enable shit again or reinstall bloat with updates.
This, plus I’ve found corruption to be a way bigger issue on Windows. I had been using a Win10 install for about 5 years and eventually it just stopped booting and I had to reformat. Maybe it was my SSD, but I’ve been running Linux on that same SSD ever since then with 0 issues.
Realistically you don’t have to if you’re not constantly tinkering, but if you’re changing a lot of low-level stuff without knowing what you’re doing, you have the ability to break things. If you don’t know how to fix them, then it’s easier to just reformat. Basically it’s a skill issue lol.
I’ve broke things often and had to reinstall a lot because I didn’t know what I was doing. Still kinda don’t know, but do y’all recommend anyways to learn the knowledge?
Like I could probably read through man pages but I want something that shows how everything builds on each other to fill any gaps I’m missing
Depends on what you’re breaking I guess. If it’s DE stuff, kernel stuff, etc. Usually I just find a good YouTube tutorial if I want to learn something new and don’t know what I’m doing.
The Arch Linux Wiki is an incredible resource, even if you’re running another distro. Most of it is pretty universal (other than specific commands like the package manager), and it explains how everything functions and fits together. If I’m troubleshooting, it’s always my first stop.
I would recommend reading the manuals yes. Their are many manuals and not all are equal. The man pages can feel a bit strange as they list everything the software can do. To learn I found the archwiki to be better. (Also info manuals but many people are weirded out by the controls used to read these.)
Also don’t blame yourself for reinstalling if you mess up. It’s normal especially if you need the computer to actually work in a timely fashion
Just keep breaking stuff! It means your learning and trying new things, for the most part. Eventually you’ll just break stuff less and less or know what to look for when something breaks. On that note do try to struggle with something a little bit before rolling back or reinstalling.
Yep tinkering with the system is probably the main issue (for that NixOS is awesome btw.). But even when you’re not constantly tinkering. System-State accumulates over time, bugs are also apparent in (upgrading of) distros, and the maintainers of a distro cannot realistically handle every upgrade time-point x -> y, so stuff will likely break after some time.
But even when I have fixed all the issues in my previous at some time broken distros, at some point it just feels good to have a freshly installed system without all that dirty accumulated state (NixOS + impermanence and you’ll have that every reboot :P, see also this)
Fixing things in place in windows is a nightmare for the most part. Users are dumb fucks. Power users and admins are mostly the same. With a consequence that when you have a real obscure problem, there is no documentation by anyone anywhere. Certainly not microsoft with their posh ‘documentation’ that really doesn’t explain a thing.
Doesn’t really help either that they change things with every minor update. And their basic structure is one big mess of mixed environments and totally diffferent visions. Let’s not even talk about their scripting language where nothing has standard behaviour.
Ffs I hate microsoft. I’ve been managing that piece of shit for way too long.
I mean, do the people at the fediverse really talk mainly about Linux? I see in both Lemmy and Mastodon more people talking about US politics, LGBTQ+ stuff and furrys (lmao) than anything related to technology in general. I guess the kind of content someone sees would depend a lot on the instance someone creates their account in?
I see some Linux but I’m subscribed to a lot of techy communities. Self host, programming etc. So it’s kinda normal.
Could be the default view on each instance… On my first account I subbed to a lot of different communities on different instances so I saw all the crap. Eventually due to all the politics bullshit I just migrated to my current instance which has hexbear and lemmygrad blocked so it’s been a lot better.
But even so, I always see a bunch of politics crap on the memes community.
Hopefully all the different clients will soon support good blocking. With connect for android I can block instances and keywords, but I most just continually block on a community basis what I don’t want to see from All. I’m sure there are hundreds in there. This keeps it quite relevant for me but I’m still in the flow of seeing new subs. I do subscribe to all the ones I really like.
So it’s a curation process, but a more active one vs trying to hunt subs down like I used to do with Reddit.
Yeah, I’m kinda mad at all the Spez/3rd party app stuff, but the constant hate has got me thinking about leaving lemmy. It’s sad because I like the idea behind lemmy but people have no respect.
I like hearing different sides of things but absolutely everything is political here and it’s either black or white. Ffs
I know a little linux, but obviously I’m still learning. I’ve picked up everything I know on my own, for the most part - internet guides from the linux community tend to be pretty solid, and I know enough to not totally FUBAR my system.
Is there a listing of standard linux directories and what they’re for? Lite /etc, things like that. Because I seem to find bits of different stuff in a variety of directories.
I’ve recently moved to linux on my gaming rig, which is my daily driver - that being said, it is mainly for gaming. Anything can surf the web or play videos and shit, for the most part.
I don’t get it. I am on sh.itjust.works and yes I see the odd Linux post, but not so many that it stands out. I am even on many tech subscriptions. This seems overblown.
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