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

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.

It didn't happen THAT often before, but as a previous Windows user and restore point fan, Timeshift was a game changer. Don't have to tread lightly anymore. :D

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.

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.

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

That’s how the pros do it.

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

Literally this morning I started getting boot errors. It is telling me WBM can't find the boot file. But I should be booting into grub, so idk what to do. My boot order is Ubuntu, then USB. And that's it. And now I'm out of the house all day and can't do anything but sweat about it.

This was me back in the days when breaking anything xorg related

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

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.

earlier days? this was me last week after failing miserably to install poetry 4 times in a row and destroying my python environment.

I switch distro once I start feeling that my current installation is too bloated and requires a heavy cleaning

Which is why I switched to nixos, so that I can’t bloat my system up with packages I eventually forget about

This is the way

Me rn frfr

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

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

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.

Wait isn't this the standard? Debugging can take hours, but it takes like 5min to reinstall