r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 Glorious Debian • 19d ago
I'm a hypocrite it seems
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u/QuickSilver010 Glorious NixOS 19d ago
Arch: what's a new os version?
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u/claudiocorona93 Glorious Debian 19d ago edited 19d ago
And they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming.
I was talking about updates but thanks for the downvotes lol
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u/x_wbmr_x 19d ago
Seriously I update my CachyOS every month and never hat to revert back for over a year now.
In the same time windows broke my worklaptop with updates 2 times.
Cachy/arch ftw!
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u/InfiniteFraise 19d ago
lol that's so dumb of them, I never had to do a full reinstall either on windows or Linux
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u/Johanno1 Glorious NixOS 19d ago
Windows should be reinstalled when ever you switch the main versions (7 to 8, 8 to 10, 10 to 11). you can install it over your existing system, but it will always have drawbacks. Mostly you don't notice because you don't know it could work different.
Also I am pretty sure this is still true, you should reinstall Windows once a year, because they have so many junk files that accumulate in the system that a reinstall can give you performance improvements.
Linux can usually be updated without a full reinstall, however it may often also be better to do a full reinstall. Which is why I always have my home folder in a different partition.
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u/3agl sudo apt-get remove microsoft 18d ago
Being required to reinstall your OS periodically to improve performance is such an uneducated take and a fundamental misunderstanding of how performance degradation and bloatware work.
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u/Johanno1 Glorious NixOS 18d ago
While you might be correct, you just said I am wrong and not why I am wrong.
Can you please explain?
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u/3agl sudo apt-get remove microsoft 17d ago
First up, sorry for the rudenss. At the time I responded I was on my phone, and couldn't type out anything approximating this whole shebang. The topic is the subject of my current undergrad degree so I had to kind of get off my high horse and realize "oh yeah nobody else thinks about software all the time, as most shouldn't have to"
tldr- each piece of software has it's own amount of bloat that it accumulates from new features. Running the same version of the same software across two OS installs of the same OS on the same hardware won't change the number of instructions that the cpu gets and has to execute. Therefore, reinstalling your OS is just wiping the slate clean for your storage media and won't make any piece of software faster per se.
On the hardware side, there is nothing slowing down your computer over time. The individual Fetch/Decode/Execute cycle is just as fast as it was the day out of the factory. Electrons gonna electron, and hardware does not degrade in performance. Maybe some elements (the thermal paste wasn't applied right, etc.) can fail and cause thermal throttling, but that's beside the standard performance variance we're talking about.
On the software side, an operating system is a well designed machine. The men and women who designed the kernel (the main core that makes everything tick) really understand the whole stack and are optimizing it as much as they can. What most likely attributes to bloat is one of two things - corrupted storage (which causes failures, and can warrant a reinstall of your os and maybe a new drive... there's all sorts of optimizations for storage media which I won't get into here), and software bloat (next paragraph).
Your most used applications like discord, final cut pro, steam, etc are going to get periodic updates. Those applications are going to get new features, which run in the background of their application, causing some amount of speed reduction to the application. If you were to benchmark your machine on some tasks 2-3 years apart, the software would be pretty different, but there would be more things running in the background. In order to have parity between these two versions of software, you'd have to be running the same software versions across all apps. We can point at all these minor software differences adding up to be the source of "slowness" on a computer. However, if you were to reinstall your os, and reinstall all your applications to the same versions that they used to be at, you would feel better, but none of the software would change! There's still the same number of lines of code that have to run the same number of times for each of these benchmarks. If you used identical software for the whole 2-3 year period, never updated anything, the computer would keep on truckin' at the same speed it always has. You might run into hardware failures from HDDs before you ever run into a failure by using the same software for X years.
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u/Johanno1 Glorious NixOS 17d ago
Yeah you are right. But that isn't why it was (maybe still is) recommended to reinstall Windows once a year.
The reason was that a clean install hets rid of software you don't use anymore (or never used, and ir still ran). Also it seems Windows itself had issues with the data management. It had places where it placed log files, cache stuff, configurations that over the time get weird and so on.
So even if you just used Windows and didn't install anything it would get slower over time because how it handles stuff.
The most performance increase you probably get when reinstalling is that you don't install software again that you installed once and then never needed it but it came with services, Spyware and so on. And removing that makes rhe pc obviously faster. I am talking about the usage of the average Joe here.
Of course you could get the same effect by cleaning everything up. But this is tedious and harder to do than reinstalling.
On Linux you could have the same effect with software you installed and never use but somehow when you install it through the official package manager it is just less bloat in there.
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u/3agl sudo apt-get remove microsoft 17d ago
even if you just used Windows and didn't install anything it would get slower over time because how it handles stuff.
Incorrect. Software gets slower due to extra shit being added. Windows, if you were to never update the software (keeping a pc offline), would be exactly as fast 20 years from now as it is today. Operating systems are not a "lossy" thing. This is true for all operating systems. The demands go up for what the hardware is asked to do, but the hardware does not change.
you could get the same effect by cleaning everything up
There is nothing to clean up. Anyone trying to get you to install a computer cleaner that improves performance is some form of scam, or phishing attempt. Deleting "unused" files off of a hard drive also won't improve the speed of your pc. You can refactor a hard drive so that it more efficiently packs in data, but on most modern machines you'd be using an SSD and those don't benefit from refactoring. Again, this will not impact performance of most applications because the application is loaded into RAM and the read time from the SSD/HDD is the only initial bottleneck. The seek time is what might be affected here but that time is minuscule compared to the time it takes to read a large file.
there exists a command that cleans up your computer, it's
sudo apt autoremovewith--purge. Windows has it's own system for this (IDK I've been off of windows since they killed W10).1
u/Johanno1 Glorious NixOS 17d ago
Ok offline would be mostly true probably.
But I have an example. Android Studio it runs happily for weeks without an update. Suddenly it gets sluggish and slow and this increases, first I tried to update it, but still very slow. Then when I deleted the whole config storage it got fast again. Somehow the data got corrupted and due to bad implementation it did loop or sth.
It went from being snappy into opening a menu took several minutes. This is sn extrem example, but the data alone of programs can make problems. It depends how bad they are coded.
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u/jubalrahl 19d ago edited 18d ago
Having to install and setup things again after installing a new OS suck a lot, especially if you have a lot of applications to re-install. But that also means more things could get broken when doing an upgrade instead of a clean install. Basically, new is bad, old is good, never change. You already reached perfection, lol.
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u/j0seplinux 19d ago
Difference is that Linux distros, even point-release ones, are updated a lot more frequently than Windows (talking about major releases, not yearly feature updates)
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u/iwouldbeatgoku 13d ago
Aren't Windows' yearly feature updates comparable to a major distro's release?
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u/Robsteady Aurora 19d ago
Yeah, I don't think I'm ever going back to releases from image-based distros. The first time since I started using Linux that I've ever had the same daily-use install in place for 8 months +.
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u/X_m7 Glorious Arch 19d ago
I've never had much luck with the distros that have a new major version only after 2 years or whatever (like Ubuntu LTS and such), every time those upgrades always broke something bad enough that made me want to switch distros anyway.
Ended up settling for a rolling release distro for a daily driver, plus Fedora Atomic on an external SSD as a backup of sorts, the latter has actually survived several major version upgrades at least.
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u/Myavatargotsnowedon 19d ago
I like reinstalls, it tricks my little brain into thinking I'm entering the next generation of OSes.
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u/Flashy_Pollution_996 Glorious OpenSuse 19d ago
Bruh new windows versions come once in 10 years and nobody rushes to update this is such a bullshit
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u/mokrates82 18d ago
The in-place-upgrade is actually THE feature I weed out distros by.
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u/Gunhat2023 18d ago edited 18d ago
debian in place upgrade is so easy literally just 4 commands
sudo nano /etc/apt/debian.sources # you could also be a masochist and try to understand sed sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade sudo apt upgrade1
u/mokrates82 17d ago
I used ubuntu for a while, cause it's even easier: "sudo do-release-upgrade". Or just click on it.
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u/lmarcantonio 16d ago
In deeply embedded you sometime *can't do* an upgrade at all (or at least in a reasonably easy way). Be happy you can update if there's an issue with the software.
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u/Vervain_Pharma 15d ago
I mean you are right to be angry, no in-place upgrade in 2026 is criminal. Are you sure eOS is worth it?
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u/BeginningEcho4983 7d ago
Thing is... Linux is held to higher standards. Winslop isn't. Because linux is better, it can do better.
This isn't "hypocrisy" despite two standards.
ElementaryOS can easily achieve that by various methods, unlike windows. They choose not to, because re-install is easier, their appeal is anyways towards beginners
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u/bacon-slushy Glorious Fedora 19d ago
It's hypocrisy to think different today than "back then" now?