Honestly I’ve been using Linux for like 15 years and there have been times that just reinstalling which takes 45 minutes would have been the fastest and easiest solution to a problem I will likely never encounter again.
If you have things backed up well that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes but yeah there is definitely an argument to be made depending on your preference.
I recently switched to CachyOS. While I don’t have the same hard-on for it that most users seem to have, I like how it’s set up by default to create a btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem before and after each update. Grub can even boot into individual snapshots directly. I’m almost looking forward to the day it saves my ass after an update breaks my system.
Or just keep back ups and reinstall the OS.
Honestly I’ve been using Linux for like 15 years and there have been times that just reinstalling which takes 45 minutes would have been the fastest and easiest solution to a problem I will likely never encounter again.
My new go to plan. Thank you for the idea!
Timeshift or equivalent, love my daily backups and very fast restore plus 2 anchor points. Saved me a few times and the gf once so far.
When you go down the rabbit hole a debate starting from scratch again:
45 minutes to re-install the OS.
Another couple of hours to get all of the common programs you use downloaded and installed.
A full month or more of customizing everything to your preferences and downloading the programs you rarely use.
You completely skipped the “keep backups” part which prevents most of this.
This is where Ansible comes in.
If you have things backed up well that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes but yeah there is definitely an argument to be made depending on your preference.
I recently switched to CachyOS. While I don’t have the same hard-on for it that most users seem to have, I like how it’s set up by default to create a btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem before and after each update. Grub can even boot into individual snapshots directly. I’m almost looking forward to the day it saves my ass after an update breaks my system.