This installation of arch is 2 years old at this point and there’s nothing wrong with it and I want to do a clean reinstall to feel more fresh. But I’ve been constantly delaying it for a long time because I’m scared breaking something and also not having my laptop fully functional for even a day isn’t a pleasant thought.

The benefits I think is being able to handpick which files I want to keep and which packages I would reinstall since the thought of how many files and packages are left over from when I momentarily needed them is really unpleasent. But this habit of reinstalling the OS as a cleanup method might be a bad one I’ve brought myself from the time I used windows which was justified back then but it may no longer be here since I can achieve what I want with a much more simple and less risky method

So am I being an idiot here? Or should I go for it?

Edit: I do have bleachbit but the benefit of a reinstall is that only system files, essential packages and my personal files are kept (actually copied out, formatted and copied back in for my files). These two aren’t the same

Edit 2: Thank you everyone for their answers, it’s clear that I don’t have that much reason to wipe my system at the moment. It might be a better learning experience to look for orphan files and packages

  • BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    15 days ago

    I went from Endeavour, to Arch, to Manjaro, to Void Linux, back to Endeavour over the past 3 years. I use restic for onsite/offsite backups, and man does it feel cathartic to pick and choose which dotfiles you want to restore from backups.

    Also the first time I ran Arch, I had tried to switch from systemd-boot to grub and I must have messed something up, because frequently (enough) when paru was doing a kernel update I would end up with a hang into an unbootable system that required fishing out a liveUSB to resolve it.

    Much like uninstalling applications in Windows leaves shit in the registry, pacman can still leave mud in various places.

    That being said, I don’t think I’d do a re-install into the same distro however.