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
have / on one partition and /home on another, when reinstalling, reformat or reuse / and set the other as /home again. Worked very well when I switched from Ubuntu to Manjaro last week when Ubuntu refused to boot up for me for no obvious reason.
Lol this is still me after 20 years of using linux
BTRFS is your friend guys and gals ☺️.
I switched to BTRFS recently, but found myself even more fucked when my system stopped working suddenly and I didn’t know how to fix it without reformatting and installing grub again. Actually lost even more than I would have otherwise just because I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to get any form of recovery to work. That first EndeavourOS install didn’t last 2 months sadly.
Yep, everyone goes through that the first 2 or 3 installs, until you learn how CoW FSes work. It’s not like anything else and it takes a while to master it, but once you learn how to use it, you don’t reinstall ever again, just roll back snapshots 😉.
Ah, the Windows approach. The few times I worked with PC Repair shops, backing up everything and reinstalling the OS was the go to for most “repairs”. Especially since it was faster and cheaper than just researching all the issues and repairing them the “right” way. Although to be fair, if the OS is borked enough, backup + reinstall IS the right way.
