• marcos@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again. So, no, it’s only productive if you are in a fucked-up environment where changes bring more breakage than they fix.

    It’s useful if you don’t plan to do the same thing again, though. So if you are just trying random stuff, yeah, go ahead.

    • hersh@literature.cafe
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      3 hours ago

      If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again

      Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

      For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.