I got fed up with spending weekends redoing themes, fixing package breakage, and hunting lost dotfiles whenever I swapped laptops. If you care about uptime and reproducibility more than distro-faith, stop treating your desktop like an altar and treat it like infrastructure: encrypt the disk, snapshot the root, manage dotfiles as code, and back up everything that matters. Do that and a dead SSD or a new laptop becomes a 30-minute restore, not a week-long grief spiral.

Do this in order: 1) Install with LUKS full-disk encryption and Btrfs subvolumes for @ and @home so snaps are atomic. 2) Enable automatic snapshots with Timeshift or snapper. 3) Export your package lists: Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt; Arch: pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt; also flatpak list --app > flatpaks.txt. 4) Put your dotfiles under version control and manage them with chezmoi or GNU Stow. 5) Use Flatpak for GUI apps, containerized toolchains (podman) for dev environments, and keep only system-critical packages in the distro manager. 6) Back up with Borg: borg init --encryption=repokey /path/to/repo ; borg create repo::$(date +%F) /home /etc --stats ; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. 7) Keep a small, bootable USB with the exact kernel/tools you use so you can unlock LUKS and mount Btrfs snapshots. 8) Test restores quarterly: restore a snapshot to a spare partition and boot it. Do that for a year and tell me reinstalling is fun again.

Yes, it takes a few hours up front, but imagine swapping a motherboard or recovering from ransomware and having a known-good snapshot plus a package list and borg repo waiting. Stops the doomscrolling and gets you back to actually using Linux.

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    4·
    4 hours ago

    Holy moly… I’m sitting on a couple of installs I’ve upgraded from 2016. I’m too lazy to reinstall.

  • paper_moon@lemmy.world
    8·
    6 hours ago

    People still do regular reinstalls? I just copy over my parititons to the new laptop and… Continue on with my day, haha. There’s some steps I had to take for the LUKS encryption which i forget now, but once you get LUKS setup, I’ve been able to just copy stuff over. I’ve had the same install of Ubuntu for basically 10 years, over 3 laptops.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I had an upgrade fail and completely break the install a long time ago. I haven’t tried a distribution upgrade since then. I just format and install a new distro every couple of years. It cleans out all the crap I end up with from 3rd party repositories and stuff I’ve compiled from source. I’m sure upgrades probably work a lot better now though.

      I did have Arch running on one of my laptops for quite a while, but I quit using it after it started falling apart.

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Even this seems too hard. I don’t know what @ and @home are, or how to find out, for starters

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      You can view the source for my comment and copy paste :)

      Do this in order:

      1. Install with LUKS full-disk encryption and Btrfs subvolumes for @ and @home so snaps are atomic.

      2. Enable automatic snapshots with Timeshift or snapper.

      3. Export your package lists:

        • Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt
        • Arch: pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt
        • also flatpak list --app > flatpaks.txt

      4. Put your dotfiles under version control and manage them with chezmoi or GNU Stow.

      5. Use Flatpak for GUI apps, containerized toolchains (podman) for dev environments, and keep only system-critical packages in the distro manager.

      6. Back up with Borg: borg init --encryption=repokey /path/to/repo ; borg create repo::$(date +%F) /home /etc --stats ; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6

      7. Keep a small, bootable USB with the exact kernel/tools you use so you can unlock LUKS and mount Btrfs snapshots.

      8. Test restores quarterly: restore a snapshot to a spare partition and boot it. Do that for a year and tell me reinstalling is fun again.

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Lists should be like this

      1. Apples
2. Oranges
3. Bananas

      And it will show up like this:

      1. Apples
      2. Oranges
      3. Bananas