Along the way I’ve broken things like when I was trying to improve my audio because the sound sucks, except now on reboot sound doesn’t work at all until I start messing with input/output and I can’t even tell you what causes it to come back.
Display often messes up on reboots as well, second monitor stops working for a time until constant messing with display settings finally bring it back.
So my question is, if I live boot and choose “Something Else” at installation, will all of my installed packages remain, including whatever I’ve messed up along the way? Am I looking at nuking and paving instead?
Also, would that be a time to switch from Gnome to KDE or is that a whole different mess for me to screw up?
You can’t practically reinstall and keep and all your packages. If you reinstall, you should erase everything. You can simply reinstall all your packages and keep everything without using the installer. However, the chance of that fixing anything is pretty low.
If you want to switch to KDE, that I would go ahead and wipe and reinstall. Be sure to create a new user account though and not try to re-use the one you have.
Alternatively, you could try creating a new user account in your existing install and see if that resolves the issues you are having.
If you plan to change DE’s then you may want to make sure the package list you make doesn’t contain any DE specific apps that may require other parts of the DE to be installed.
And as always backup your files before starting the process.
Sorry, that was unclear. I just meant some custom option available during installation. It’s been a few years since I’ve had to install, can’t recall the details.
Thanks for that list suggestion and the link to learn about the process too. I’m 98% settled that I need to wipe and start fresh.
To help walk backwards, I’d recommend making a log of system changes you make, so that you can more easily undo changes.
There’s /var/log/pacman.log to cover package installs/removes/updates. But consider the config file changes and updates you make and keeping a log of these.
Obviously not keeping this on the computer itself.
Solid plan, wish I’d have thought of that sooner but glad to have that idea going forward!
As I look at wiping and reinstalling, one thing that bothers me is not being able to limit my battery charge (couldn’t find a way to do that) but one thing I need a working solution for is my printer.
Brother provides a driver but they are deb and rpm for my printer and I’m considering that as I reinstall. Are either of those able to work with Endeavour? I don’t want a different OS but I need this printer functional for work.
On limiting battery charge, I hacked the scripts that display my status bar in my window manager to check if the battery is charging with the acpi command, and to pull the current value. If it’s greater than my limit, I then notify-send and it creates a notification dialog.
For your printer driver, possibly. .deb and .rpm’s are basically archives. You can find tools to extract the files and hopefully follow the included script or file hierarchy to move them to the right places. Are you sure the driver isn’t in AUR or Arch?
It doesn’t appear to be available, I have a brother mfcj5855dw. Would be a big help if I can get that working consistently, I did follow the instructions for packaging Brother drivers but the results are very inconsistent, printer constantly needs to be removed/re-added.
Finally…I can print without problems. This is another reason why I want to stay with EndeavourOS. You guys are all patient and helpful, even though I’ve been using EOS 4+ years and still know so little!
Would there be a way for me to reset my sound device rather than reinstalling?
