I would have agreed with you until I hit Arch and Nix (for different reasons). Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about

I would have agreed with you until I hit Arch and Nix (for different reasons). Even back in my windows days, I would say wiping the OS and starting fresh about once a year was fairly common, and often avoided a lot of pitfalls. But... I've been running about 8 Arch machines at home over the last 5 years (6 servers, one desktop, one laptop), and mostly don't feel the need to wipe them. There's a little bit of cruft, but it's usually related to me doing things, and not the OS itself. So the system still feels stable and solid. --- Personally - I think for Arch, it's a combination of "Not changing upstream" and "upgrading constantly" so that they don't have a lot of custom cruft to start with, and they have to deal with the upgrade process all the time, so it's not some "huge lift" that happens once every 2 years. Nix has a similar free feel, but it's not so much that upgrades are painless (they aren't), it's more that "wiping" the machine takes a different tone when you basically wipe the machine with every config change, and reverts are simple and easy. Both are pretty nice, though.