Uhmm… am I the only one that thinks the exact opposite regarding Linux? On (older versions of) Windows it is actually necessary to reinstall from time to time to get rid of the cruft, but a rolling release Linux distribution just never needs a reinstall. I have even gotten new hardware and just swapped disks (or copied over my home directory) to have the exact same system as before without the need to reinstall.
All distro hopping roads have a stable exit path to arch or other rolling release distros, when we realize there’s no reason to switch.
For me, it depends on how much I fuck around with the system. For example, I installed my current system at the start of the year. Since then, I have notably:
- Tried out several different programming languages
- Set up QEMU+Vagrant
- Played around with Nextcloud and Joomla
- Shortly installed the Enlightenment DE to see what that’s up to
All of these tasks required some changes to my system that I don’t necessarily need anymore.
And as this post implies, it’s fine. It doesn’t actually impact anything. But I would like to have that cleaned up anyways.
And if at some point, I have too much time at hands, I might actually deal with that. And then re-installing may seem like the easier option than manually going through everything.
That’s me alright!!
At some point I was doing it each 2 weeks due to the inability to secure it, another OS though that I rather stay nameless. It May or may not start with the character W.
I used my OS for 4 years every day until it became really buggy, than I just switched the harddrive now I have a new os and a really messy backup
I needed to reinstall ubuntu after dpkg had some issues with the kernel
Well it probably is assuming you install everything by hand and don’t use a backup. After 6 months you prob have a bunch a leftover files from uninstalled programs/playing around wich are gone after a reinstall (unless you backup EVERYTHING)
