For this particular VPS, I’ve moved provider several times, but every time I just use Clonezilla to clone the disk over the internet. Maybe I should do a fresh reinstall one day. There’s just so much random stuff running on it though.
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.
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.
Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It’s a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.
Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it’s probably more stable these days.
You probably don’t have much on that system and/or you have a lot of discipline…
I did reinstall it after max 1 1/2 years (Arch btw.), either because of breakage, or weird behavior, or it was a chaotic dumpster fire.
At some point I discovered NixOS and was sold (and am still sold after 3 1/2 years using it). But it has a steep learning curve, though it certainly got better over that time.
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