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lolwut? Unless something major changed, you're dropped to a terminal as soon as you boot the install image, and have to either have advanced knowledge on what

lolwut? Unless something major changed, you're dropped to a terminal as soon as you boot the install image, and have to either have advanced knowledge on what to do from there, or have the wiki side-by-side on another device. And unless you're taking incredible notes at the same time, good luck replicating the set-up if you need to reinstall. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and most other mainstream distros at least boot you into a GUI to install.

imtringued 3y ago
Replicating the setup when you need to reinstall? What? I once had my computer crash during a kernel update and this left the system unbootable. All you have to do is use the arch iso and arch-chroot into your system to rerun/undo the kernel update or whatever other update broke your system. The thing is, even a "reinstall" is merely about deleting packages and then rerunning pacman and reinstalling your bootloader. Your /home and /etc stay untouched. You can take the list of installed packages and then install those. I mostly needed that when moving from an old laptop to a new one.
- Espionage724 3y ago
  Cruft is left around from caches and old program data all the time. A clean install handles that, and lets me verify my configs are still good and think about way to change them. Clean installs also let me do full-drive SSD trims. I do OS reinstalls maybe 1-2 times a month unless I'm testing something, and can re-deploy my personalized set-up in less than an hour. I'd rather nuke from orbit and rebuild than duct-tape holes :p If my system became unbootable for some reason, I'd fix it and ideally find out what happened, backup stuff, and reinstall. Best-case, everything is fine (although I'd change distros if it ever broke because of a clearly untested updated). Worst-case, the system becomes unbootable again because of the same issue and I can report it upstream with more confidence.

imtringued 3y ago

Replicating the setup when you need to reinstall? What? I once had my computer crash during a kernel update and this left the system unbootable. All you have to do is use the arch iso and arch-chroot into your system to rerun/undo the kernel update or whatever other update broke your system. The thing is, even a "reinstall" is merely about deleting packages and then rerunning pacman and reinstalling your bootloader. Your /home and /etc stay untouched. You can take the list of installed packages and then install those. I mostly needed that when moving from an old laptop to a new one.

Espionage724 3y ago
Cruft is left around from caches and old program data all the time. A clean install handles that, and lets me verify my configs are still good and think about way to change them. Clean installs also let me do full-drive SSD trims. I do OS reinstalls maybe 1-2 times a month unless I'm testing something, and can re-deploy my personalized set-up in less than an hour. I'd rather nuke from orbit and rebuild than duct-tape holes :p If my system became unbootable for some reason, I'd fix it and ideally find out what happened, backup stuff, and reinstall. Best-case, everything is fine (although I'd change distros if it ever broke because of a clearly untested updated). Worst-case, the system becomes unbootable again because of the same issue and I can report it upstream with more confidence.