I'd just say that you should try out other distros. Even for newbies, Ubuntu is not the best choice nowadays due to shady practices of Canonical. Maybe something like Debian, or Fedora would be a better choice for you, depending on whether you prefer stability or newer features.
I second this. Depending on what you do on your PC, there's probably a better distro with way better default setup, for example gaming distros like Bazzite, that has most of gaming-related stuff already built in. (Note, Bazzite is an atomic distro, which has a lot of caveats, it was just an example since I use it, it might not be the best for your workflow/what you want from the system.)
If you tell us what is your goal (i.e learn more about setting up linux, have a perfectly fine tuned os, or just have an out-of-the-box experience) and what you want to use your PC for (gaming, developemnt, cybersecurity...), we can point you to a direction.
I test drove a few others before I settled on Ubuntu, e.g. Fedora, Zorin. I settled on Ubuntu for the benefits of the LTS versions. Ideally once I set up 26.04 I’d rather not have to worry about it for 10 years, or until I build a new rig.
Then I'd suggest Debian. But of course, you do you.
Edit: EndeavourOS is another solid choice if you want to try out the Arch family of distros. It may seem counterintuitive for long term usage, but in practice, it can be very stable. I've been using the same installation for more than 5 years now. You get all the latest stuff, and upgrades are done regularly, so there's no issue of major version upgrades like Debian or Ubuntu.
Been using endeavours over a year now, and love it
Separating your / and /home into different partitions could help for future distro hopping.
I’ve heard this suggested before. Do you happen to know how to do that during the install process?
Should be an option during the reinstall, around the time it asks about file systems and whatnot, but I haven't touched Ubuntu in about 15 years, so I have no idea what their install software is like. It's a fairly standard thing though, so I'd honestly be amazed if it wasn't included.
I remember when I installed 24.04 it asked about the mount point, so it might be around that same time. I’ll have to pay closer attention this time.
Just to expand on this - it's because if you reinstall your OS again, you can just delete the / partition, and keep the /home partition with all your user non-os data. It has config files, and most of the data you're working with on your PC, sans actuall applications.
Once you install a new OS, if I understand it correctly (never actually done that) you can just use the same partition as /home without having to copy anything anywhere, you just select it during install, and it will use it with all the data.
Especially if you are on a laptop and work on it, I'd definitely encrypt the drive during install.
I've encrypted my partitions on my PC too to be extra preventative of attacks coming from other operating systems i dual boot that run more random software (and are potentially more risky but probably not and I'm maybe paranoid idk, just sounded like I was being smort).
Set up some kind of system restore/snapshotting solution.
If your OS breaks, you can just roll back to an earlier state.
Others will have to chime in, I'm on an atomic distro that does it easily and by design, but every time people were arguing about wheter atomic distros suck or not, the counterargument was always "but rollback is super easy nowadays", I just don't remember the software used for it.
Is there a reason you think you need to reinstall from scratch? Short of a destroyed root disk, or wanting to change filesystems, there are really no reasons to need to do a full reinstall.
Since I’m relatively new to the Linux game I’ve made a few mistakes along the way. Installed things wrong with Wine, installed multiple versions of the same thing, etc. I figure I can just back up my personal files and then start with a clean install.
I'm a big fan of occasionally starting over just because I can, and distro hopping.
Personally I run Kubuntu on my daily driver, but I'm experimenting with kde linux (the people behind kde plasma made their own immutable Linux distro instead of hitching it on Ubuntu) on an old laptop and I'm loving it so far.It's very experimental though, so frequent big downloads for updates and things that might not work as expected, though apart from my laptop being configured in BIOS to do RAID for the single disk it has (???) and kde linux breaking specifically for RAID I haven't run into any issues.
I definitely recommend backups of all things you consider important, if possible the whole disk perhaps, just for ease.
Then if you have a big enough disk I would recommend partitioning it into:
This way, assuming your data partition isn't entirely filled, when the next distrohop comes around you can just shrink the data partition for a new linux partition, install linux on that one, and you can dual boot for however long you need to verify that the new one works.
Then what I do is symlink my home folder and keep it on the data partition. The benefit is that it doesn't get wiped if you wipe the linux installation partition. The downside is that some programs (notably anything in snap's sandbox) have issues with this, due to what I think is either intentional and I missed a config somewhere, or a bug in apparmor. It doesn't hinder me a lot so I haven't looked into it enough to fix it yet.
Try installing some programs using the Nix package manager. It lets you declare a list of packages in a flake.nix file and then it'll download and update them for you automatically. And if you use git to keep track of the changes to flake.nix, you can easily undo changes if you screw something up.
Home Manager does the same thing but for your app's config files (so you can easily back up and synchronize them)
Both of these make getting set up after a fresh reinstallation much faster! (There's also "NixOS" which is an entire operating system that uses Nix for configuring the whole operating system but I wouldn't recommend that until you've tried "Nix" first)
I have Timeshift set up on my current install, so I’ll probably go with that again. Good advice!
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