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Ask HN: How often do you guys make a fresh OS install?

 3 years ago
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Ask HN: How often do you guys make a fresh OS install?

Ask HN: How often do you guys make a fresh OS install? 8 points by kkotic 27 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments How often do you do it? For what reasons? Do you format the drive, keep your files, apps?

I think I make a fresh macOS with drive format install monthly, I'm kind of obsessed...

Never unless something is corrupted or it's absolutely needed.

Why? Because it takes me weeks to months to get the system configured in the same way again - there's a lot that you can tweak, so many programs requiring all kinds of packages, files and customisations when you do full stack development and have a few hobbies.

I often see the advice "just do a clean install", even on the apple forum when people have problems - and it always makes me angry, surely those people aren't professionals as "just reinstalling" is insanely expensive in terms of hours wasted on configuration, and you will often need to take care of problems half a year onwards especially with non app-store sip installs, kext files, packages installed via terminal, dot files etc.

I do a new VM now and again to test things, but in terms of my daily driver OS, I never do a reinstall. No real issues that would require it.

Keep in fresh install normally means you don't quite know what's wrong. With some experience you figure this out and fix it instead of doing a fresh and not knowing if the problem will recur.

Pretty sure I'm running a Windows 10 install (MBR, not even EUFI) from 2016 or so... making this the longest OS installation I've had. Not sure if OS swaps like Windows new update mechanism likes to do count as a fresh install.

Once SSDs became the norm, Windows rot has practically disappeared. The difference between boot time now and initial install time has risen by seconds, not minutes, and usability is immediate when the desktop loads.

Usually once, when I get the computer, because it probably doesn't have Linux on it.
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And even if it does, probably not the version I want
Almost never. I try not to install anything outside of docker, either. I feel that the future is a completely defined dev environment, although with docker the experience isn't necessarily great, especially as regards giving access to hw devices.
Never. Settled on arch almost ten years ago when I got the laptop I use every day since then. Never formatted, what are the benefits? I backup my data and dotfiles on an external drive.
Never. On my Windows PC, my last fresh install was on Vista, and since then, I have made in-place upgrades and image restores when switching to new system drives. On Mac OS, I also never needed to clean install.
Whenever I have new hardware.

Other than that, I didn't need a fresh new install (Debian, Ubuntu) for as long as I can remember.

Pfft, monthly is not bad but you could take advantage of the weekends and do them on a weekly basis. It's what I do and it has served me well for the last decade or so.
Never, I version my dotfiles and use aconfmgr (Arch specific semi-declarative config manager) for system stuff. So (the goal is) a 'fresh OS install' would be the same anyway.
Every year with windows, never since switching to macs.
On windows, about once a year. Now that I’m on PopOS! 1.5 years and counting.
Every other LTS, one year after it is released (usually after .1 is out)
On my main device almost never. Unless and until hard disk crashes and I am left in the dust. On my servers, every time I crash them accidentally.
Almost never. Since I am on NixOS, every system configuration 'edition' is reproducible, and easy to rollback-to.
Everytime I find a cool looking distro / derivative
What benefit do you believe you gain from such frequency?
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Absolutely nothing, I belive it's a hard obsession with making the things cleaner as possible.
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