This installation of arch is 2 years old at this point and there’s nothing wrong with it and I want to do a clean reinstall to feel more fresh. But I’ve been constantly delaying it for a long time because I’m scared breaking something and also not having my laptop fully functional for even a day isn’t a pleasant thought.

The benefits I think is being able to handpick which files I want to keep and which packages I would reinstall since the thought of how many files and packages are left over from when I momentarily needed them is really unpleasent. But this habit of reinstalling the OS as a cleanup method might be a bad one I’ve brought myself from the time I used windows which was justified back then but it may no longer be here since I can achieve what I want with a much more simple and less risky method

So am I being an idiot here? Or should I go for it?

Edit: I do have bleachbit but the benefit of a reinstall is that only system files, essential packages and my personal files are kept (actually copied out, formatted and copied back in for my files). These two aren’t the same

Edit 2: Thank you everyone for their answers, it’s clear that I don’t have that much reason to wipe my system at the moment. It might be a better learning experience to look for orphan files and packages

  • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    21 days ago

    My arch install is 10 years old at this point.

    I would be interested to know what inspired the need to “feel fresh” from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can’t handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as “needing a cleanup” ?

    If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).

    Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands. “Qdtq” means “Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet” (“quiet” makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them “Rns” means “Remove, no backup, recursively” . and the - at the end means “Use the values from the first half of the pipe”… This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.

    For this command, a “dependency” is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn’t been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.

    This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.

    But overall, there’s very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.

    But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.

    • www-gem@lemmy.ml
      2·
      20 days ago

      Thanks for writing this response so I don’t need to spend the time and efforts you did to write it :) Hopefully OP find it useful.

      I’m in the same boat. I’m running the same Arch for 15 years now. The only cleaning is for old packages and config files. Also, if you remove the packages correctly, the maintenance should be minimal.

      There should be no need to do a fresh install of the OS. This is another great benefit versus others. Even when I change my machine, I just install an image of my old system so it’s fully functional right away.