How often should you reinstall Endeavour?

General system
1

I forget where I heard it, but some youtuber mentioned it being a good idea to back up and reinstall your OS once every 18 months for cleaning purposes.

This seemed pretty subjective and I was just curious if or how often you long-term non-hoppers would ideally reinstall your Endeavour for the aforementioned reasons.

2

It’s a rolling release. Properly maintained it is the same as a fresh install as far as EndeavourOS is concerned.

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3

Unless something breaks which you cannot fix, I don’t see a reason to reinstall at all. Anything you would ‘clean’ from reinstalling you could clean without doing so.

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4

The, uh, “Arch” installation on one of my laptops is from 2016 (the oldest one had bad RAM so suffered from file corruption and needed a reinstall last year). Other people will have older installations.

This is one of the key benefits of a well-maintained rolling-release distribution: it just keeps rolling.

Of course, if you regularly install and remove a load of random stuff then configuration files might be left behind, and reconfiguring things or not actively maintaining things then something might break, so wiping then might make sense. However, that sort of testing is better done in a VM so it’s isolated and trivial to wipe.

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5

This would be especially important for OS’s like that one from Redmond, which does tend to accumulate all sorts of cruft. Far less so (if not completely not so) for rolling release distributions.
But given that, sometimes it might be quicker to reinstall than clean up (lol) after some years. Especially if you’re prone to install lots of stuff that you never use.

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6

Some YouTuber likely doesn’t use an Arch based OS. You only have to reinstall if you want to. And if I were me, I’d back things up way yyyyyuyuyy more often than once every 18 months.

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7

Umm…never? If you are reinstalling to clean your system, you are doing it wrong. The thing that makes an Arch-based distro so great is that you never have to do this.

If you believed that 90% of the Linux information on youtube was incorrect, you might be overestimating the accuracy rate.

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8

YouTube, Reddit, and various “tech” websites are terrible sources of information, especially when it comes to Linux. You should never blindly follow a “tutorial” from such places (in general, you shouldn’t do things you do not understand).

Usually, whenever you need to figure out something specific to Arch, the best place to find information is the ArchWiki.

Active forums, like this one, are also pretty good sources of information, since if you spread misinformation here, it typically gets corrected by more knowledgeable people, like @dalto.

I only install EndeavourOS once on a given hardware. When I change hardware, I typically just install the OS, instead of using an existing installation (though the latter is entirely possible, as well).

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9

I never reinstall Linux. And this is also true for Windows which I have running in a virtualbox since ages.

10

I keep reinstalling eos every now and then cause i cant make up my mind on which de i should choose, i will set things up kde only to mindlessly load up my usb again to nuke it and reinstall gnome, then i will reinstall kde again and move again to gnome, i seriously need help.

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11

Nothing prevents you from using more than one DE. You can run Gnome alongside KDE and pick between them when you log in, keeping all your software and files, without nuking your OS.

12

Yeah but i just don’t like keeping both, its either one or the other, i cant make up my mind.

13

I only use like 5 applications. Mainly Brave browser and don’t experiment or rice desktop etc.

Guess the less packages, the less problems. If I were to re-install it would be based on saying the time to reinstall/restore is less than time to fix if something does go wrong.

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14

Whether or not to reinstall your system is entirely on you.

The pacman package manager is the best package manager created for a rolling release and when you stick to that you will never have to reinstall your system.

Windows is well-known to accumulate useless files and cluttering with saved versions.

Ubuntu is Debian based and while it is technically possible to avoid it is well-known to recommend reinstall on every release - or using LTS which boils down to once every 2. year.

Years ago it was a pain to reinstall a system - but with modern cpu’s and nvme - time is no longer an issue - and if you keep your data on separate disks it can be super simple to restore a workstation.

I have - over the years - developed a routine making my downtime for reinstallation 10-15 minutes.

I do it sometimes - simply to start from scratch - only copying back select configs.

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15

You still don’t need to Reinstall that is new user mindset. my 1st arch install lasted 12 years in that time it had every DE, WM at one time or another just one base install, but when the h/d died i installed a SSD and gnome3 and have not bothered since as i’m now old and know what i expect from a DE. lol. Read the wiki on maintainance and cleaning its the same base only the DE/wm changes and its more fun doing it your way. :100:

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16

https://github.com/endeavouros-team/EndeavourOS-packages-lists

Here you’ll find the EndeavourOS default list of apps for each DE, and simple instructions how to install a DE.

So this should help to avoid reinstalling. :sweat_smile:

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17

How did i miss that, i’ve been reinstalling for past few days :scream:

18

The lists were added there relatively recently.

But in principal, the same information has been available at our github place for quite a long time. These lists simply make their usage easier.

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19

@manuel, what do you think about this idea: make a super simple script that just prints out the contents of these package lists, and add it to the endeavouros repo? So that we can just

sudo pacman -S eos-listpackages

and then just run

listpackages xfce | sudo pacman -S --needed -

to install xfce, for example?

A nice thing about it is that it would get updated easily, and one could easily maintain a “default” system with packages from the latest ISO.

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20

Thanks for the input! I was already thinking about a rather similar idea, something like an app with the following usage:

DE-manager --install xfce4 --uninstall gnome
# or
DE-manager -i xfce4 -u gnome

Those options could be repeated on the command line if more than one DE is wanted.
Just must make sure that everything works after running this… :sweat_smile:

But this has already gone off-topic, so another thread might be useful for this.

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