 So I have been using OpenSUSA now for 281 days. Now, first off, for those of you who laughed at me when I said I was going to use OpenSUSA for two years and told me that I won't even make it a year, nana nana boo boo. I'm almost out of year and I have no plans of leaving anytime soon. I love OpenSUSA, I've made many videos about OpenSUSA. I've preached OpenSUSA, I've shown my sticker, I've probably bored you to tears with the amount of times I've talked about OpenSUSA. I'm not going to talk about OpenSUSA today, but it all leads into the same thing. And what I want to talk about today is to talk about when you should actually consider reinstalling your distro because a lot of people are not like me. They use their distro for years and years without ever even considering reinstalling. Oftentimes, other people are more similar to where I'm at right now. They use it for a year or a year or two and then they do a reinstall. So what I wanted to talk about today was when you should consider reinstalling your distro. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about distro hopping. Just because you think you need to do a reinstall of your distro doesn't necessarily mean you should also consider switching to a different distro. That's a completely different conversation to be had and we've talked about that before. So instead, here are five things that you should think about when you consider reinstalling your distro. So let's go ahead and do that. But before we do, if we leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it, really help the channel. So first, the first reason why you might want to consider reinstalling your distro is if something's wrong. Now, this is the most obvious one. Like if you're having some problem with your distro that you just can't solve, then a reinstall might be one of your options. Now, maybe you can't solve the problem or maybe you just don't want to. Maybe it's too difficult or you just don't have the time and a reinstall would actually be quicker. That's one reason why you might want to do a reinstall of your distro. You just have something going wrong and you don't want to fix it. The second reason is that your distro is a little bloated. Now, a lot of people don't have as big a problem with this as I do, but I'm a Linux YouTuber. I tend to install a lot of applications. I'm also very curious by nature. So I tend to install stuff. Also, you've probably noticed that I tend to change my mind a lot. So I do tend to switch back and forth between many things. So right now I have about 10 different window managers installed. I have two desktop environments installed, maybe three at this point. I don't even know. I have a lot of stuff installed just in terms of window managers and desktop environments. I have a ton of that stuff. In terms of packages, I have over 5,000 RPM packages installed and 47 flat packs. So I have a lot of packages installed. And that doesn't even include the things that I have installed in DistroBox, which is probably another 1,000 packages on top of that. So I have just a ton of packages. Now, I've talked about package counts in the past. You can't really rely on these things because every distro counts things differently. OpenSusa tends to count each individual package. And that's why it seems so high. Debian does kind of the same thing, whereas Arch tends to package things together. And that counts as one. And that's the reason why Arch is usually a lot lower. But no matter how you count it, 5,079 packages in terms of just RPM packages is a lot of packages. So my distro by anyone's measure is very bloated. And that's one of the reasons why I personally have started to consider doing a reinstall of OpenSusa around the year mark of my two-year challenge. Just because it can take some of the cruft, because there's a lot of those packages I just don't need. Chances are there's about half of those there that I don't even know what they are, to be honest with you. You know, they're just things that I installed or came as dependencies to something that I installed. And they just kind of have been there for the last 281 days. And they're just sitting there not being of use to anybody. So that's another reason why you might consider reinstalling your distro, because it has become overly bloated with packages and cruft. The third one is kind of related to that and that your computer has started to be a little slower. So I've noticed this just a little bit. Now I didn't actually notice it until I installed OpenSusa on my new home lab machine and found that zipper is amazingly fast over there. Now I've been complaining about zipper being slow for ages. Now when I say amazingly fast over on that computer, I'm being a little bit facetious. It's not amazingly fast, but in comparison to this honking piece of garbage here in front of me, it's night and day. And one of the reasons why, and I stopped to consider why this could possibly be, is that I have a ton of repositories that I've installed and kept installed from the OBS for various reasons. Over the course of the last almost year, I've installed a lot of stuff from the OBS using OPI. And that just has led to a lot of repositories being having or a lot of repositories having to be refreshed every time zipper runs to update or install package that slows zipper way down. The more repositories you have, the slower the zipper is going to be. So that's one of the reasons why the computer behind me, or the guys can't actually see it now that I think about it, it still is behind me. Just the shots are different. But anyways, the computer on my standing desk, that's the reason why that one's so much faster is because there's not as many repositories. So that's another reason why you may want to consider reinstalling your distro is that your computer is just kind of feeling a little slow because more packages, more stuff running at startup, more stuff having to kind of run in terms of system deservices and stuff. All that can lead to slower boot times, slower launch times of applications, slower update times with your package manager, all that stuff can be affected by having just a lot of stuff on your machines. So if your computer is starting to run a little slower, maybe a reinstall is something that you can should consider. Now the fourth one is one that I don't follow my own advice on because it's not really necessary, but it's something that you might consider if you're wanting to do this. If you're thinking about switching to a different desktop environment, often times the best, most cleanest way of doing that is to do a reinstall. Now you don't have to do it this way. If you're running, for example, open SUSE, you can go into YAST and easily switch out the desktop environment that you're using. But what I found is from personal experience on this install is that when I switch back and forth between things and I uninstall stuff and I reinstall stuff and all that stuff, a lot of craft gets left behind. And that leads to mess and package conflicts and all sorts of problems that you just kind of don't want to have to deal with. So if you're considering switching between, say, GNOME and KDE, maybe you want to consider doing a reinstall to a version of your distro that supports that desktop environment out of the box, which most of them do have versions of both of those. So it's easy to switch back and forth. Now again, this is absolutely necessary because it's easy to do with your package manager and in most cases to switch back and forth between them. But stuff does get left behind and oftentimes things do sometimes break. So the biggest one usually switching between GNOME and KDE is that it oftentimes will switch to a different display manager and that can oftentimes cause some issues. So if you're experiencing those issues or you just don't want to have to deal with those issues at all, maybe a reinstall is something you want to consider. And finally, the fifth reason why you might want to consider reinstall is simply because you want to start fresh. Now, this isn't really something that you can measure. It's just kind of going to be a feeling. Maybe you've been using your current install for five, six, seven years or something like that, and you're ready to start fresh. You want to completely fresh home directory. You want to completely fresh that config file. You want a completely fresh experience right out of the box. And the only way really, truly to get that is to do a reinstall. This isn't something that everyone experiences. Most people don't, I don't think really care all that much. But if you've been using your distro for quite a long time, even just 281 days, it can start to feel like you have stuff too cluttered, that things are just kind of too well worn. And you want to actually get a brand new fresh out of the box, new car smelling experience from your distribution. That is something that is very proper for you to be feeling and you shouldn't feel any shame about it. So even if your computer, even if your distro is running perfectly fine, just wanting to a fresh start on your new on your distro isn't something that you should push aside. If you want to have that fresh feeling, go ahead and do it right. Now, here are a few things that you should just obviously make sure you are aware of. And they're mostly obvious that you should kind of keep in mind before you do a reinstall. First, the big one, make sure you back up your data. Always, always back up your data and do a double or triple check before you hit the format button on your hard drive. Make sure you have everything you could possibly want off from your partition before you format it or before you reinstall your distro. You want to make sure that everything is off there and safely backed up before you can no longer get to it because you don't want to have all like, oh, man, there was that one config file. It wasn't safe where it was supposed to be. And I didn't back up that file. You know, you don't want to be in that situation. Make sure you back up everything you possibly can. You'd rather have more data backed up than not enough. So back up your data seems obvious. But everyone, I think, has been burned by that at one point or another. Make sure you do that. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you've been using your distro for a fairly long time, you may have forgotten the growing pains that come along with setting your your distro up for the first time. It's if it's been a while, you may have forgotten that you need to install codecs on OpenSUSA and Fedora. You may have forgotten that you have to set up, you know, exactly the way that you want it. If you're using Ubuntu or a GNOME based distro like Fedora or even Cinnamon, you have to spend some time getting that to be the way that you wanted to be. And maybe you've forgotten how much of a hassle that can kind of be. So you want to go into this experience being a little bit prepared to know that you may have forgotten some of the things that you usually have to do. One of the things that can kind of save you from that feeling is to have an install script. If you have applications that you know you need to install before you wipe your existing install clean, go through your applications menu and make a list of all of the applications. You absolutely know you're going to want to reinstall. Obviously, you're probably not going to need all of them. Some of the things you'll find that you just installed there on a whim and you never used them before or you never used them after the first time. You don't need to write those down right down the ones that you know you're going to want to reinstall. And that will help you when you have reinstalled to get all the stuff you need up and running so you can just can continue on using your computer and doing your work. So you want to make sure that you have a good list of the things that you know you need to reinstall before you actually do the reinstall because it's much easier to look at your existing or your existing application menu and see all the applications you have installed than trying to remember after you've done the reinstall all the things that you had installed previously. So make a list. It'll make you much happier. So those are the things that you need to keep in mind and reasons why you may want to do a reinstall. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can also follow me on Massed on Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. You can also head on over to the store, which is available at shop.thelinuscast.org. There you'll find desk mats and hats and hoodies and t-shirts and all sorts of stuff. All the merch sales go directly towards helping me make more Linux content just like this. So thank you so very much for those of you who have done so. I really do appreciate that shop.thelinuscast.org. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing without you and the channels without anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support. Also, I just realized I haven't been talking into the mic this full time. So if the audio is crap, now I know why. Matt, learn how to do YouTube videos. I will try to fix that in post, as they said, because I'm not really recording because this is just no. Anyways, thanks everybody for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. I promise to remember how to use the microphone the next time I do a video. Probably. Maybe not. Anyways, see you next time.