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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

> Even when I was running Windows, I would wipe my computer every few months. I kept a "Backup Image" handy with all my settings already installed. I've spent far too many hours trying to undo damage I've done to my systems by installing random software from the internet onto my workstation; I've come to value the option of resetting my computer to a known, healthy state immensely.

I often thought I was the only one. On Windows, macOS and even Ubuntu I was reinstalling my OS at least three or four times a year. I had install scripts and GitHub repos designed to reconfigure my machine after each install. The process always took a full day.

Now I'm on NixOS. I have three .nix text files, .emacs, .bashrc and that's about all I need to backup in order to clone my environment on any machine.

I've also stopped reinstalling my OS all the time, as I always know my machine's state, just by looking at those few files.

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I was puzzled by the article authors statement on this. My main daily machine is Windows 10. It's been running the same 'copy' of Windows 10 since late 2016, and has gone through all the major updates since then, and has had many applications installed and removed on it since then. Office has gone from v2010 thru v2013 to Office 365 (effectively v2019), and I'm always playing with new software. The machine still runs perfectly fine, with no strange problems, errors or slowdowns.

To rebuild it to the state it currently is, would take me several days of installing and configuring, for very little benefit. Imho, there is no reason to reinstall your OS every few months.

I can't speak for the experience of Windows 10 because I stopped using Windows altogther some time around 7. But I entirely sympathise with OP's habit. Maybe not as fequently, but at least once or twice per year, I reformatted my disk and reinstalled Windows just because if I didn't the whole system became sluggish and unusable. Looking back on it I think it was also a way of exerting control over a system I knew wasn't truly ever mine.

Fun fact: Nowadays Windows reinstalls itself for every major feature update. But settings are copied over so you don't have to reinstall all your applications.

And since I think v1803 or earlier you can basically do an OSX like in place reinstall keeping your files and apps or just files not to mention the actual Reset feature built into recovery that can do this without an install disk/usb. Quick, simple, and works very well unless the OS is shredded by bad GPOs or other changes most users won't be able to do themselves.

I don't think the author was up to speed on caring for their Windows install or simply messed with it enough to break it over time and should have been prepared for the issues that brings. I've stuck to a pretty clean W10 install since mid 2015 so when I reinstall I'm up and running after Ninite and a few other installs I keep on a file share like specific drivers or apps I don't want to download again. W10 is fairly robust unless you do things to break it like click through UAC prompts, edit Windows dir files without backups, or install unvetted software from the internet (spoiler: same wisdom applies to OSX and Linux)

For me, Windows XP was the last version of Windows I found the need to reinstall regularly. I skipped Vista, and from 7 onwards, I never felt the need to do a reinstall.

I set up my current desktop with Windows 8.1 more than 5 years ago, upgraded to Windows 10, and still use the exact same installation to this day. It even survived a migration to a new SSD when I upgraded the PC a few years back.

The “needs regular reinstalls” meme had merit 10+ years ago. These days, not as much.

I used to update my memes and references every few months, but since Windows 10 came out I haven't needed to reinstall my memebase as often so I am still running some old memes.

If you want this and still want the polish of Fedora + Gnome, try SilverBlue - https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/

Built on Project Atomic (https://www.projectatomic.io/) and OSTree (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WorkstationOstree)

You can achieve the exact same thing. e.g. here - https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/minimal-or-custom-sil...

To put it kindly Fedora has never been a polished experience and gnome still hasn't fixed its memory leak that they spent a, decade pretending not to notice.

I've used Fedora (albeit not with Gnome) for more than 5 years at my job and didn't have major issues with it. If you're the kind of people that think Fedora = Gnome, then that's not true. You can have Fedora and run KDE, XFCE and whatever else you want. But I agree, Gnome sucks.

Fedora by being a testbed for RHEL will always have the goal of testing things before they are ready and will NEVER have the goal of providing an optimal experience.

Them memory leak on Gnome shell is fixed on version 3.28.4 for me. It was memory-leak on Ubuntu 14.04 but they fixed in 14.04.2. The "a decade" claim needs some evidence.

The memory leak is the result of a poorly designed interface between compiled code and javascript. The result being that memory wasn't truly leaked in the traditional fashion but rather was consumed rapidly and freed on no sane timescale.

This mismatch between compiled code and javascript existed from inception to now. The fix if I understand it correctly is to really aggressively free memory in a fashion that appears grossly inefficient but in practice performs acceptably.

The release of gnome 3 was in spring of 2011 the "fix" was released in spring of 2018. It would be more accurate to say that it was terribly broken only for the first 7 years of its existence.

Because their "fix" is a hacky workaround for the fact that the only true fix is to throw everything away and start over the bug is actually back in 3.34

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/1740

This brings us to an 8th year of shipping a broken product heading for year 9.

That this was a bug that sprung into being in ubuntu 14.04 and was fixed in a point release is totally incorrect.

NixOS feels great, I love it. The only gripe I have with it is the inability to just run a custom binary on it. For me the explanations on how to get it to work or write a ?Nixpkg? file was not very clear. Now I'm back on ubuntu and missing the simplicity of NixOS, everything was just so simple and light. I've used ubuntu, arch, manjaro and elementeryOS before, but NixOS felt the nicest.

I don't want to distrohop anymore, Arch was awesome and NixOS feels like the next step. But it doesn't really feel ready for a (maybe) less experienced user. It feels a bit like gentoo in the way that you need to re-link the libs for non-nixos packages or package a binary you just built yourself.

I think the thing I'm going to try next is PopOS with only the Nix package manager, it feels like a good middle ground between living in configs and no hassle with non-entry level documentation.

Sounds like we've made exactly the same distro-hopping journey. I went from Arch -> NixOS -> Ubuntu, and am now torn between Pop!_OS, Fedora Silverblue, or back to NixOS. I thought Ubuntu would be nirvana - just use the defaults, and use the computer as a tool rather than endlessly tweaking it forever - but it's less "just works" than I was lead to believe and I miss knowing the exact state of my system just from a set of nix files. I'd love to know if your Pop!_OS + Nix solution works.

It's kind of a pain, but you can use buildFHSUserEnv [0] to run a custom binary. If memory serves, this also works by writing the config for buildFHSUserEnv in a .nix file, running it with nix-shell, and then running the desired binary "the old-fashioned way."

[0]: https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-fhs-environments

Both reinstalling every X months (as well as NixOS) seem like an awfully unproductive use of time.

It's ok if that's your hobby. But it just isn't necessary. I've been running the same install of MacOS (with updates) for eight years and it's working fine.

Think of it as testing a backup.

I’d rather use a vm for that.

Basic devops management.

Reproducibility is a little less convenient, but you can ask apt to dump which packages you have explicitly installed, and then clone the machine by asking it to install those packages again.

I never felt the need to reinstall OSX .. EVER. I was doing it very often with Windows and some times with Ubuntu (haven't used it that much personally outside of work)

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