NightFantom

For me the biggest leap was letting go of my local settings. My kubuntu has about everything I want out of the box, then I install zsh with omz and I’m pretty much done.

So whenever I break something it’s an easy fresh install.

My data (steam games, code) is in a separate drive, and especially with cloud saves / git everything is available even if I were to break that drive (would just suck to remember which things I need to redownload from where).

So that helped me release my tinkering spirit as much as I wanted, and while I’m far from a Linux guru, I’ve definitely learned a lot from that.

Edit: not to say that I don’t try to fix things, just knowing that I can easily restart is the main thing.

I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I’m assuming it’s AI slop, and I’m hoping the comments are interesting.

Who’s going to say what is to be reset in a “full new install” and what is kept? I don’t think the line is as clear as you think.

For example, the disk space. Maybe one partition was made to be a flat amount, and another gets what’s left, maybe it’s a percentage split. Who’s to say?

What if the rest of the hardware is significantly different? Maybe your old amd setup needed no third party drivers, but your new nvidia setup is broken without the third party drivers?

I don’t think copying the username / password is a good idea either, ever, by the way.

I think the gray area between cloning and just doing a fresh install without copying anything is a little too personal (and/or hardware-specific) to really manage well this way.

I have an arctis something, 7 or 9, not entirely sure anymore and posting this from my phone. Only thing I needed the drivers for the mic loopback settings (which I used my gf’s old windows laptop for for like 5 minutes) and otherwise there wasn’t anything I needed. The wireless connection base station is just usb plug and play, no drivers needed. Not the same as the nova but my 2 cents, good luck!

I’d wager most, if not all of them. Ideally you’d have a program you want to use because it’s promising, but instead you keep returning to whatever you used before that because certain use cases aren’t handled well (or at all).

Thanks!

Got any links to resources you used / recommend for this / further reading?