There is a certain thrill when you nuke your disk to install a distro you never tried before. I actually just nuke one of my laptop last night to try void linux.

Yeah, I don't think that's the best selling point for desktop use. For me it's having all my configs for all my devices in a single place, checked in git, with bits of config I can easily share between my different devices.

Hey, man. Some of us just suck at everything but reinstalling.

You clearly don't have a software hoarding problem

Easy install is not the only benefit. You also get fearless upgrades. When I upgrade my Nvidia driver and it inevitably exposes bugs in one of my apps, I can always jump back to the previous build version without uninstalling anything.

Every few months or so? There is always that one distro that sounds cool and maybe it's better than what you are using atm. Yeah, sure. It's mostly a waste of time and I keep coming back to Arch after a few days, but without this drive I would not have ever tried Arch in the first place. So because of this I found my favorite distro, but I can also never be 100% sure it's the best distro. Pros and cons, I guess.

Damn... 8 years? I made it almost two years with tumbleweed on my work laptop.

I like mixing it up, trying different diatros and various programs. After awhile, a fresh install just feels nice...

Could I maintain the same OS install for the life of a device? Sure. Can I resist disro hopping? Nope!

I made it, I think, 3 years on a Fedora install once.

Same. Even for Windows…why reinstall so much? I installed W10 1607 and I’ve just been installing updates. Same for my Linux machines. Just upgrade and be done people.

I didn't reinstall my OS because I wanted to. Ubuntu messed up the upgrade from 20 LTS to 22 LTS. There was some message in the console, but an hour later I forgot about it and shut off the computer without checking the message again

When it came back it was a terminal and I had no working WiFi. I googled how to do WiFi on Ubuntu from the terminal, but the answers all told me about the previous WiFi on Ubuntu and I didn't even have that daemon

Eventually I wiped the drive and installed NixOS because it backs up your previous configs. When an upgrade fails you just undo and go to the previous working version.

Maybe not useful for yourself alone, but the benefit of being able to share your entire config with others doesn't sound bad

Main machine was last installed with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Running 22.04 now. Gonna celebrate a tin anniversary this year! 🎊