When You Don't Want to Tinker Much You Just Use GNU/Linux, Not Windows
A reader recently told us about some "book and a nice webcomic," which we've been using a lot today, partly because it's FOSS-centric (with allusions to BSD and GNU/Linux). All the content is free to share. "Everything on this website is in the public domain," it says.
Speaking of BSD, Ruben Schade has just published a technical post about "Wiping machines every year". He said: "Thesedays, I have FreeBSD and NetBSD servers and hosts that have file creation dates old enough that they could learn how to drive and drink, though hopefully not both concurrently. Linux as well. I’ve been shocked to discover an old FreeBSD jail, or a NetBSD Xen VM, or even an old Debian services box that’s still kicking around a decade or more after I initially made it."
Our previous servers for this site (and the sister site) were not wiped for about a decade (the virtual machines 'traveled' between datacentres though); the OS ran "in-place" and upgraded "in-place" between 2014 until late 2023.
Schade says: "Desktops though are a different story. For one thing, desktop and workstation have entirely different spellings to servers. For whatever reason I’ve continued to wipe and reinstall my machines every year."
I have a very different experience as some of my laptops didn't have an OS "clean install" since 2016. That's almost a decade ago. My main laptop was last rebooted 524 days ago; the secondary laptop 458 days ago (total of nearly 1,000 days for both). That means that my running desktop sessions go back to 2023.
As an associate put it, "the 'reformat, reinstall' mantra is an easy way to rid systems of third party software through attrition since (on Windows) it always involves multiple, extra steps which might not get done for various reasons; in contrast, FOSS operating systems do not need such treatment and anyway have fine repositories which can be used manually or through scripts..."
With GNU/Linux upgrades are possible and, failing that, one can just back up the home directory and copy it "back into" the new OS. Installed software can be added based on an exported list of installed packages.
So what Schade describes might simply means over-tinkering or unusual usage patterns. A lot of the files on my computers are well over 20 years old.
Using Windows (or being used by Windows) is a waste of time for many reasons. It is also highly risky, not just due to security breaches but flaky security patches that tend to brick machines sooner or later. █