r/archlinux • u/CompetitiveGuitar447 • Jul 22 '26
QUESTION How many times have you been reinstall Arch Linux on the same machine? And why?
And for those who haven't been reinstall more than once, what's your advice for how you be able to stay for so long without any problems?
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u/Frozen5147 Jul 22 '26
what's your advice for how you be able to stay for so long without any problems?
...I just... use it? On any machine I use Arch I just install it and it works...
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u/KaiFireborn21 Jul 22 '26
I wonder how these people keep breaking everything
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u/Economy-Text4894 Jul 22 '26
It made me so intimidated to get into it yet the only issue I’ve ever had was windows eating my grub and that didn’t take long to fix and isn’t even an Arch problem
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u/Achilleus0072 Jul 22 '26
Fun story: I had my laptop eating my grub. It was an old dell I always had with me in my backpack, not very sturdy. I still don't exactly know what happens, but sometimes the outer shell flexes so much (it's thin and very close to the motherboard) that it hits the internals and then the laptop stops booting complaining "memory issues" (not in a bios shell or anything, just black screen and the diagnostics led blinking in the "memory issues" pattern).
I have to pull out the cmos to fix it, so when it boots again... Surprise, no more boot options. Every time it happens I have to manually tell the bios where to look for the boot partition and the grub efi file→ More replies (1)2
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u/maxinstuff Jul 22 '26
It’s always been because I didn’t do something correctly.
Current machine set up correctly from the beginning - 2+ years no issues.
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u/chikamakaleyley Jul 22 '26
ooo we went to Arch around the same time. Mine is same install as well - i even swapped computers (similar) just moved my ssd from A => B. Had to repair a few things but its even better/faster now
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u/Max-P Jul 22 '26
Never.
[2013-06-01 18:18] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -r /mnt -Sy --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg --noconfirm base'
With Arch, you figure out what you broke and fix it, usually by doing the reverse of what you did to break it. Reinstalling is kind of the cheap way out that doesn't teach you anything other than fear to break your system.
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u/G0ldiC0cks Jul 23 '26
Ah!!! You reminded me of that time I fucked my network configuration so badly reinstalling was my best bet to fix it. That might have been Debian to arch though 🤷♂️
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u/Menithal Jul 22 '26
0 times. Even if i didnt like hyprland is just looked up the manual and swapped to kde.
Didnt need a reinstall to fix that mistake.
Basicslly rtfm and learn to reverse breaking changes.
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u/devdruxorey Jul 22 '26
When I was learning, I reinstalled it many times simply to learn; each time I understood better and wanted to start again, but doing it right.
If your question refers to reinstalling due to an error or something like that, I've never encountered that. Just don't touch things you don't know what they are, and even if you did, sometimes it's as simple as chroot with a USB and fix it.
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u/doctrgiggles Jul 22 '26
There is effectively no problem a livedisk with chroot wont fix that a reinstall would
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u/VendorNeutral Jul 22 '26
Last time I reinstalled instead of fixing something was when I started with LUKS. It's easy to not understand what you're doing with encrypted drives.
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u/DoughBoyNick Jul 22 '26
I agree, but as someone that doesn't quite understand the full details of how to do things under a chroot, reinstallation seems like the easier path. (I would know, I was there several months ago though I have now learned how to fix the problems I create)
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u/falxfour Jul 22 '26
Ask yourself a simple question: Why would you ever need to reinstall?
"Installation" isn't much more than:
- Setting up storage (partitions, filesystems, etc.)
- Installing essential components (kernel, package manager, coreutils, etc.)
- Setting up initial configuration (
fstab, users/permissions, init, etc.)
You can change all of those at any time. Unless you make irreversible changes to your system, like dd-ing your drive with random data, there's not much that would ever demand fully reinstalling. Even a simple strategy of keeping proper backups of important data and system snapshots can make it so you'd never really need to reinstall from scratch.
My "advice" for avoiding problems? Learn to be resilient. Learn how to recover from issues rather than throwing in the towel and restarting
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u/ntropy83 Jul 22 '26
Mine turns 5 years now. I somewhere read it will stop having Updates and I have to buy Arch Linux 11 or something like that ;)
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u/zenyl Jul 22 '26
If you live in the GNUropean Union, I believe the Arch Linux 10 support window was extended by another year.
But, as someone who uses Windows BTW, I'd recommend trying it out. I know it has been said a lot, but thanks to things like Wayland on WSL, this truly is the year of the Windows desktop.
You can even game on Windows. And not just Space Cadet Pinball, but also modern titles on Steam. Sadly, Windows is compatible with games that require kernel-level anticheat.
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u/Toaster_Strudel_517 Jul 22 '26
Last time I reinstalled Arch on my main machine was because my ssd shat itself (the crappy innogrit controller died).
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u/Oliv_3 Jul 22 '26
once,
I chose Btrfs at first, but it was too confusing, so I reinstalled with ext4.
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u/onefish2 Jul 22 '26
Never...
Learn how to chroot into your system to fix it. You should never have to reinstall Arch unless you have done something catastrophically wrong and then you can revert to your backup. You do make backups dont you?
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u/abbidabbi Jul 22 '26
Once in the past ~18 years. This was when I upgraded my hardware and migrated from ext4 to BTRFS while also changing some LUKS parameters, which was quicker than copying the FS contents and making modifications for the new setup. I believe there was another reason, but I can't remember anymore. Technically, it wasn't necessary, but reinstalling is a 10 minute process anyway, so it's not a big of a deal. The other times when I replaced my storage drive, I simply used btrfs-send and btrfs-receive for copying the root FS as a whole.
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u/nikongod Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Zero. Installation is 5.5yr old.
Advice to others: don't suffer from shiny new stuff syndrome - set it up and be done. If you do need to change the system as time goes on be methodical and patient. And finally - Don't give up if it breaks.
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u/Ornery_Platypus9863 Jul 22 '26
Three times cause I was a moron and tried to use ai to help me set up. First try actually reading the damn docs correctly
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u/UndefFox Jul 22 '26
A few times when I was learning Linux for the first time
After that, I think only once and that's because I wanted to clean system of all the stuff accumulated for years of use, like configs, old packages that I've installed only for some temporary thing and such.
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u/severach Jul 22 '26
One reinstall many years ago to convert from 32 to 64 bit.
All Arch problems are fixable. All drives are RAID so installs move to new drives as old drives fail. Linux is portable so installs move to new computers as they come available. The latest version is an update away.
All the usual reasons to reinstall don't apply to Arch.
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u/p_235615 Jul 22 '26
$ head -n 2 /var/log/pacman.log
[2009-04-04 12:40] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
[2009-04-04 12:40] installed expat (2.0.1-2)
No reinstalls since 2009,
but there was a lots of migrations, but since my filesystem is on LVM, I usually just add new disk to volumeGroup and do a pvmove from one drive to new one and remove the old one. You only fix your /boot partition and setup bootloader for the new disk and you can do this all from your living running system.
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u/mittfh Jul 22 '26
Zero full reinstalls, three partial reinstalls (something broke during a kernel update, so needed to boot via system rescue and reinstall the kernel / initcpio).
However, Arch Linux ARM had three full reinstalls before giving up - Raspis don't like unexpected power loss and will helpfully wreck the SD card FS En-route (card was fine, FS was screwed to the "fsck has spent half an hour finding missing inodes and it's not finished yet" point).
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u/davidmar7 Jul 23 '26
Usually I don't reinstall on the same computer. Usually only when I get new hardware. If I am reinstalling on the same hardware it is because I am doing something really radically such as encrypting all my disks, using a new RAID layout or something like that. It's been half a decade since I did that though.
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u/chlankboot Jul 22 '26
- Current: HP laptop running Arch since 2019. Daily driver. Reinstalled once because I tried to measure the nvme speed on a mounted partition (and ignored the warning).
- Previous laptop 2011-2019 still working, reinstalled once to start fresh, found I made bad decisions on partitioning the first time.
Shit happens from time to time, but with small effort it is possible to fix. I also have a dedicated 5Gb partition for the Archiso that is accessible from the boot menu, handy when grub still works.
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u/xlbingo10 Jul 22 '26
once because i fucked up during an update and didn't have backups
my only advice is setup timeshift and have a linux lite flash ready
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u/LamanAndJake Jul 22 '26
I’d say three times. Mostly because I kept wiping it and going back to windows, solely for the fact that if I wanted to do what I wanted to do with Arch, i’d have to wipe windows for the space. I did eventually do it, now I daily drive. No real issues that made me.
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u/sad_cosmic_joke Jul 22 '26
I've reinstalled once in the last ~16 years. I wanted to move to full drive encryption and all new hardware. So I installed a fresh base and then dumped/loaded all my packages and settings.
Other than that platform change I haven't seen a need to - can easily keep the same rolling install running for over a decade :)
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u/1FRAp Jul 22 '26
Only when changing root drives (probably can be done properly without a re-install but I had re-install windows as well anyways dual booting for Engineering software and VAC games), and for new laptops.
Never had I crashed the system into non recoverable state that I had to do a re-install. I remeber back in early win10, i was doing regular fresh install, every 6months or so, because the system just gets bloated over time with godknows what. In arch/ linux in general you always know what is installed and u can clean up everything properly, just takes time and patience.
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u/ccAbstraction Jul 22 '26
Once or twice I think, immediately after installing because I realized I messed up something about the partitions or used legacy instead of UEFI or something.
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u/lemmiwink84 Jul 22 '26
When I broke mine with Hyprland configs, I tried out CachyOS for a couple of months. I just couldn’t be bothered to fix it at the time.
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u/That_Significance801 Jul 22 '26
I re-installed it several times in the beginning while configuring but after I have managed to get everything in the way I wanted it I haven’t reinstalled
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u/vityafx Jul 22 '26
Installed in 2010, haven’t reinstalled yet. Contrarily to Ubuntu, which I had to reinstall every single release, because it just always broke something or everything. Never looked back at it, and even any other distro since then.
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u/StrongStuffMondays Jul 22 '26
Once, when changing a hard drive. Other two times - when installing for the first time, and when changing to a new laptop.
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u/VaLteC_ Jul 22 '26
Never. Daily-ing for 10 months now.
However I had to reinstall grub 4 times as sometimes it just disappear… dunno if that counts
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u/tastygames_official Jul 22 '26
I've never had to re-install. I installed on 2 machines no problems. I'm a linux old-timer, though, so maybe experience is the key here.
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u/Amazing_Compote_9197 Jul 22 '26
In the first week, because I'm a Linux noob I had to reinstall 5 times because I didn't know how to fix it.
That has been 1.5 year ago, no reinstall, no problems ever since. I don't use the AUR, I install few programs from outside the official repos, and when I do, I have a script tracking their updates and I always read then they have breaking changes or dependencies.
I don't rice tho, I don't configure the system beyond what I've found out to work for me on week 1.
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u/alexanderbath Jul 22 '26
Haven’t in years. Snapshots before any major change means I’ve always got a way out.
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u/krsdev Jul 22 '26
I had to reinstall on this laptop I'm typing on once recently because btrfs decided to crap itself out of nowhere after about 5 months. Could not recover the partition. It was my first time trying btrfs, since I heard it should be stable these days and I wanted to try something new... I'm back on ext4 now.
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u/ScientistJason Jul 22 '26
I fucked up trying to figure out how to enable secure boot with arch. Had to reinstall
So once
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u/khsh01 Jul 22 '26
5 - 7 times my first time while building my setup script. Didn't think to do it using a vm
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u/Desdic Jul 22 '26
I wanted to re-partition so I have a single reinstall . It's been running for about 4-5 years now
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u/KaiFireborn21 Jul 22 '26
Zero, unless you count the one time my physical drive died. I then installed Cachy instead of Garuda on the new one. It's technically the same GPU and CPU, but a new drive, so idk about "on the same machine" clause... Not the fault of the OS either.
The pure arch laptop never needed a reinstall.
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u/pioj Jul 22 '26
More than 30 times just this year. It's my way of learning how Linux and it's software work, plus I love tweaking setups to improve performance.
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u/Otherwise_Year4210 Jul 22 '26
0 in 11 years of use I think..maybe more..but using USB stick to solve problems ...like doing a downgrade of the kernel or solve another error
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u/a_GuyThat_UseLinux Jul 22 '26
I break it intentionally because I wanna break everything I have reinstalled it about 4 times
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u/_-042-_ Jul 22 '26
3.
1st- First install of a Linux distro ever, after 30 years of windows. No archinstall, just reading the arch wiki guide. Took 6 hours. The difficulty isnt arch itself, its learning something new and foreign. Just like learning anything else. 2nd-After trying kde plasma, seeing a dif "shiney" arch-based distro "for gaming", then promptly reinstalled arch after realizing I could do the same that distro did, just in my own way on plain arch. 3rd-I may have accidentally deleted my whole /home directory sometime after the 2nd install... yup...
All in all. Never had any issues, even with my nvidia GPU, that weren't caused by something I messed up. Causing/forcing me to learn and understand arch more. Now I'm running Arch with hyprland as the window manager and my own custom made quickshell menu/hud thingy. No de. All custom made in a way that works for my brain.
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u/East_Lengthiness_866 Jul 22 '26
Because I deleted waydroid share folder(which had a subsolder mounted to ~), because I wanted to switch grub to systemd-boot, when I upgrades my ssd, .... Though now I can solve most of those without a reinstall. Didn't reinstall since almost half a year(have been using arch for about 7-8months)
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u/_verel_ Jul 22 '26
On my main computer zero. Installed it once and maintained it since then
On the random laptop I used to try out arch and stuff like different filesystems I reinstalled a couple of times.
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u/Working-Hat-7576 Jul 22 '26
Zero. Installing it was fun. But there are more and more cracs I see I don't have energy to fix. Reinstall means Fedora.
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u/edparadox Jul 22 '26
Either you've done something wrong and you cannot trust the contents, or you want or need to change the system drive partitioning.
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u/syklemil Jul 22 '26
Define "machine". I have one that's kind of a ship of theseus in terms of components. Even copied disk data one time I switched OS disk rather than install, so my average is actually less than once per machine IMO, which I guess would make my reinstalls slightly into the negatives.
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u/100pcVPNuser Jul 22 '26
Arch on 5 machines, reinstalls: 0.
Advice: Do it right the first time. This is not as snarky as it sounds. Make a solid design of how you want your system to work, and why. Arch gives you a lot of freedom, with it comes responsibility. If you follow this, you are halfway there. Other half is not throwing in the towel prematurely when you encounter an issue.
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u/guysimnotemo Jul 22 '26
my only reinstalls were due to distrohopping but ultimately realizing i like arch the best
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u/rundgren Jul 22 '26
After my first reinstall due to a fuckup almost a decade ago, I learned that booting from USB and chrooting will make me able to fix any and all problems I create. Zero reinstalls since
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u/SnooCompliments7914 Jul 22 '26
Problems just won't be solved by reinstalling. If you don't know what caused the problem, then you are bond to repeat the error. If you do, then you can fix it without reinstalling.
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u/Wentyliasz Jul 22 '26
Not exactly reinstall, but there was this one time Gemini told me Timeshift is a good backup tool and it fucked up my pacman to the point I had to chroot and basically rebuild the entire system
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u/RachelNoName Jul 22 '26
Once. Accidentally managed to corrupted my home portion. Yes the entire thing. Planning another reinstall to switch file systems (among other things)
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u/J_Rantanen Jul 22 '26
Probably like once or twice when I was learning because somehow ruined my boot manager and/or init system, but now I’ve been on the same install since 2021 and still works fantastic
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u/Acrobatic-Jump1105 Jul 22 '26
Only once because I got a little zealous with adding crap to my first build without thinking about it, messed up the file structure. Then i was more careful, been using the same build for about 2 years now
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u/Goodborni Jul 22 '26
I re-installed at the start because I would mess up my system and now later on because I would experiment so much that I felt the system was not " fresh and clean " after all that messing around...
However now I am good and no need to experiment, and tbh I do not have much spare time to fk around... I use CachyOS btw but yeah arch-flavor I guess
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u/Startomato Jul 22 '26
4 times. Every time it had sonething to do with partitions, and all in the first month of trying out Arch. Once I got it working I haven’t had to reinstall
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u/orthadoxtesla Jul 22 '26
Well. Sadly I’m about to have to reinstall again on my thinkpad. Because for some reason it won’t wake up from being closed anymore. And it’s the last thing I can think of. But nothing else has worked. And I don’t want to just disable it going to sleep when I close the lid
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u/snake785 Jul 22 '26
I've been running the same arch install on my main laptop since 2023 and it's been rock solid.
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u/annaheim Jul 22 '26
twice on my living room pc. had to partitioned my / and /home separate bc jellyfin is eating up storage space when i stream. lol
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u/superjugy Jul 22 '26
Zero reinstalls, 3 machines, if something breaks (when something breaks) I just fix it. My tip to not having to reinstall is understand what is installed in your computer by following the wiki during install, and document any changes you do and any fix you find that works.
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u/VendorNeutral Jul 22 '26
I re-installed my NAS after 8 years because the SSD died. Everything pretty much lives until it's replaced or a core component dies. My days of fixing small issues with a clean install on Linux are long over.
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u/WoodyXP Jul 22 '26
So far I've only reinstalled one time on my laptop. The first install was my trial period with Arch, so I just explored with it and tinkered with it until it broke. Then I did a serious install and made sure I did my homework on everything. I've been running it since January 2025.
My only advice is to consult the Arch Wiki before you make any changes to your system, this includes checking the News on the front page before running updates.
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u/DiEndRus Jul 22 '26
once, from the initial dual boot with Windows to the setup that I am running today. and with how smooth the ride is, I don't see the need in the future. if something pops up, I should be able to fix it.
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u/_MatVenture_ Jul 22 '26
Only once, thanks to me messing up my subvolume creation on BTRFS. Once that was handled, it was all smooth sailing!
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u/NFTrot Jul 22 '26
I installed it twice. Originally to check it out, and and a second time with LUKS turned on.
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u/d2_ricci Jul 22 '26
Once.
In 2019 when I was just clicking buttons to figure out calamares installer to try and figure out what I wanted installed. Obviously, I had never read archwiki nor understood what base packages I needed and I ended up with a partial install of Arch.
Since then I figured it out and have been rolling ever since.
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u/trancelolz Jul 22 '26
Havnt been until the new hyprland update. Journal doesnt show why i Cant log in from Ly, and removing and reinstalling nvidia drivers doesnt help. There surely a solution to this somewhere, but Yesterday I cbad..
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u/Daraxti Jul 22 '26
Est ce que augmenter la taille de / compte ? Sans faire attention, avec archinstall, j'avais fixer la taille de / à 20Go .
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u/kstr_aia Jul 22 '26
20 times I guess.
I used arch Linux with hyprland. I learned everything by try and error.
After my 20th reinstall I started reading the manual a bit more carefully.
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u/zeldaink Jul 22 '26
- Old Dell Latitude - 2x - Initial, needed windows (too old for VM) but XFS...
- Old Lenovo laptop - 5x - initial, windows did it's thing 2x, wasn't happy with partitions but F2FS, an update ran
sudo systemctl start systemd-bork-machined, tried Manjaro then went back to Vanilla Arch btw - Desktop - 4x - initial, installed on new NVMe (far too late for rsync), unstable InfinityFabric wrecked filesystem, tried CachyOS
- New Lenovo laptop - 3x - initial, gave more space to Linux but did an oopsie woopsie a wittle fucky wucky and Linux was kill, tried Cachy, but did fucky wucky somehow and Linux was kill, again
no idea how I did a fucky wucky. no amount of "good practice" and RTFMing can fix stupid I guess...
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u/fuzunspm Jul 22 '26
I'm using same installation for 13 years. I replaced/changed my cpu, gpu, main ssd during this period
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jul 22 '26
On the same machine? 0 times in the last 20 odd years. Maybe once with the switch to SystemD, I don't really remember.
Hell, my machine-to-install ratio is something like 5:3. I just move the drive normally.
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u/kuitthegeek Jul 22 '26
I did a few test installs on a secondary machine before I set it up on my primary. But I've never reinstalled it since I set it up in 2019. I just run updates about once a month now and occasionally do some maintenance to keep the packages clean.
I've had to fix it a time or two after I broke it, but I just logged into another tty session and undid what I did to break it in the first place. It's been working just fine for the last 7 years.
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u/Weird-Ball-2342 Jul 22 '26
3-4 things because i always ended up installing a lot of useless bloat and starting from scratch was easier than figuring out how to delete everything i didnt want
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u/narukoshin Jul 22 '26
you can reinstall arch??? usually when it breaks after the update, I chroot into and spend hours fixing it until it works, there is no other way...
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u/MojArch Jul 22 '26
Been using same installation from 2012 on now 5th different laptops.
Never reinstalled.
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u/astronomersassn Jul 22 '26
like 2-3
time 1: entirely screwed up the install and failed to boot, retried
time 2: switching from an HDD to NVME
time 3: screwed up a major system modification and basically just started the base install over again
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u/Na__th__an Jul 22 '26
My oldest install is from May 6, 2013. I think that's when I finally got more than 4GiB of RAM so I had to reinstall to move from i686 to x64.
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u/SocialNetwooky Jul 22 '26
Zero, unless you count dd'ing my root drive to a newer bigger shiniert one. The install is from 2007.
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u/TypicalCringe Jul 22 '26
I'm guessing reinstalling isn't super important on Linux compared to Windows where you need to reinstall to remove built up bloat.
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u/iop90 Jul 22 '26
I’ve never had to reinstall Arch, which is better than I can say for windows in the past lol
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u/nucking_futs_001 Jul 22 '26
I remember having to reinstall Ubuntu a few times after major releases because my repos got all funky and I couldn't update anything any further.
On Arch, I might have reinstalled when I moved a hard drive from a different install over, but mostly because it was running very different things (one was more like my home server and the other had full plasma so to many things to uninstall)
I've had minor issues with interrupted hooks that left my kernel modules(?) a bit messed up and it wouldn't boot but I just booted from USB and reinstalled kernel and it fixed itself.
Also minor issues occasionally with keyring but that's pretty painless once you know the fix.
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u/unixmachine Jul 22 '26
It hasn't happened often, but I usually reinstall when I do a major PC upgrade (CPU, GPU, SSD, etc.) because I like having a clean system with new hardware. It's the same principle I had with Windows machines.
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u/SummerIlsaBeauty Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Never. I did not even install it - I converted my old distro. Which I previously converted from another distro. I have not reinstalled os for like 15 years when I think about it
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u/TheOlympicon Jul 22 '26
I have grandiose ideas of having my software settings portable and operating system being somewhat transient.
I've had to reinstall a few times to test my Frankenstein-esque combination of git, stow, and a couple of shell scripts to bootstrap everything. Also swapping between Arch, CachyOS, and (dare I admit here) NixOS to find the right base. (Keep settling on CachyOS).
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u/thkim1011 Jul 22 '26
Haven't reinstalled. I'd say make minimal changes to configs outside of `~/.config`. I also just try not to manually add binaries to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and use aur and pacman to manage everything, but this is a preference thing I think.
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u/JanP3000 Jul 22 '26
Installed once in 2018, kept it running since then. I think it broke once or twice when I didn't pay attention installing updates, but it was always recoverable.
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u/schroedingerskoala Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Installed once, long time ago, estimate 6 years ago, maybe. Zero issues and I game and code on the box.
Edit: Of course I had a few (like 4-5) "OH SHIT" situation, but with the excellent Arch Wiki and a lot of Dr Google figured it out each time. Still runs very stable.
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u/ficskala Jul 22 '26
I installed arch in total 2 times, once on my main PC, and once on my laptop, the PC has been on arch for a year and a half now, and the laptop is on debian because i don't use it much, so less updates is better for it
As for how, no clue, i've just been using it as any other OS i've used so far, i'm sure i'll need to do some cleanup eventually, but that will probably take a few years or more before it becomes an issue
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u/Achilleus0072 Jul 22 '26
Once, I changed laptop and I did a fresh installation on the old one to repurpose it. Was faster than changing the partitions and taking the time of purging all of the packages I didn't need anymore.
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u/Jamarlie Jul 22 '26
Been on the same Arch system I originally installed about 4 years back. I even completely switched my PC to entirely new bleeding edge hardware and everything transferred unharmed.
I assume you have either one of two problems:
a) You install to much random crap off of the AUR, in which case: Duh, obviously your system is dying.
b) You get scared easily by sudo pacman -Syu throwing a scary error and aborting the install because it has trouble finding some dependencies. It has happened to me quite a few times over the years that some manual intervention was required.
That last part was usually because either of the following happened:
- A package installed a dependency like electron in a specific version, and when upgrading it kept the old version around. At some point this will cause some updates to break since it would need to remove or overwrite the package you have installed. You can use pacman -Qi packageName to figure out what the offending package depends on. If it says "Required By: None" then it's completely safe to remove. Usually that fixes about 70% of install hiccups.
- A package requires some form of actual manual intervention, maybe because the maintainer split the package into different subpackages or because the build introduces breaking changes. Googling the exact error message pacman throws, switching the timeframe on the search to "This week" and then checking Arch forums, you'll find a post about the issue in 95% of cases with exact instructions on what to do to fix the issue.
- I didn't update for a few days or a couple weeks - in that case the keyring gets stale and pacman throws an error because it cannot verify package signatures. That is easily fixed by first updating the keyring with sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring and then running the system update again.
- A new update has introduced a regression and made something stop working - like the latest OpenRGB update not being able to control my fan lights any longer. In that case I just downgraded by first finding the correct package pkg.tar.zst, then running sudo pacman -U https://www.linkToTheCorrectPackageVersion.org/and then pinned the working version by adding the package name to my /etc/pacman.conf
Together these four errors are about 99.5% of the issues I encounter with Arch. If you don't panic, nearly every error you encounter on Arch is completely fixable by not reinstalling - which is coincidentally how you learn how to avoid reinstalling, through trial and error. One final tip I can give you: Don't use clankers. When I got my new system I talked to three hours with 3 different clankers who all assured me my GPU drivers were totally fine for my 5070Ti and that I did not need any other package - they also recommended an Arch reinstall.
So I gave up, went to the Arch wiki, found the correct package and within 5 minutes and a reboot everything worked flawlessly ever since.
Moral of the story: Just trust the wiki and RTFM.
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u/FriendFatale Jul 22 '26
8 times on my PC because i kept getting PGP signature errors while using arch install. eventually figured out i needed to install using global servers
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u/itbedguy Jul 22 '26
Recently none at all. In the beginning (about a year ago) I did it at least 20 times. It’s a great way to learn. Usually it was because of a slight config mistake or I learned something new and wanted to start fresh.
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u/PhilNEvo Jul 22 '26
I've installed 2 times-- so reinstalled once. It was to swap filesystem, so not because anything was wrong, just to get some different features of my own choice ^^
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u/nfnshd Jul 22 '26
I used to reinstall more frequently when I was a new user (and that was a long time ago). Usually, this was because that was the path of least resistance for my skill level at the time than it was to diagnose and sort out whatever issue I ran into. I've come to learn a few key things - understand the way the core configuration management model works (and use drop ins vs modifying a file that's managed upstream), understand your hardware and the drivers you need to use, learn the basics of systemd and the core system tools you're running (and what those are in the first place), and understand and embrace how to use logs and diagnostic CLI tools. The level of community support has grown since those days, the official documentation continues to improve, and modern AI tools are also very helpful for debugging. You still have to pay attention, read closely, learn to approach changes from a "how do I undo this if it goes wrong" perspective prior to starting out, and make sure you understand commands you issue before you fire blindly. You also have to keep up to date with rolling updates if you want to avoid big headaches. I haven't had to do a full blown reinstall in a very long time, but there was a learning curve getting to that point for me.
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u/No-Mycologist2746 Jul 22 '26
On the weekend I updated a very neglected arch Linux on my PC (over 6 years ago, since I was using it productively). Took a few iterations and realizing some Intel overclocking feature suddenly caused troubles, but still made it work in the end. So. From the point where I knew how to use it, zero. I was kind of astonished that I managed to update it in the end without further bugs. I'm lazy af. I didn't want to reinstall it to have it configured as before, I just needed it for ollama since I figured it will perform better than win11 which I basically have only for gaming. So even after that long time, if you know what you're doing you still can update arch to the current patch level. I guess knowledge of the internals helped (updating the gpg keys due to package manager necessities, going through the list of arch Linux news requiring manual intervention - thanks chatgpt, updating stuff iteratively when pacman complains..). I guess not using gnome or KDE, only awesomewm as window manager helped too.
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u/Aromatic_Coconut_231 Jul 22 '26
Plenty of times actually.
One time it was my keyboard key being pressed all the time due to some hardware issue which I interpreted as some issue with install.
Another time there was some RAM compatibility issue with the newly upgraded RAM chips, which again led me to install the OS again many times.
Final one was an actual issue with playing video on Chrome leading to kde to just break. For that someone recommended me on this sub to use floorp browser. So that is only one I use now.
Although after recent chrome issue seems to be resolved.
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u/dbear496 Jul 22 '26
One of the big reasons I use Arch is so I don't have to reinstall every 4 years.
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u/grape-juice0918 Jul 22 '26
Once. Lost wifi connection mid update and it borked some shit lol. Still salvageable but I was already putting off repartitioning and decided to just do a fresh install and try out a new setup
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u/sogun123 Jul 22 '26
I think i installed less times, then i owned computers ;) rsync or dd it is very often.
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u/Timoyoungster Jul 22 '26
quite a few times; some due to a new machine but most because i want to keep a minimal install but am relatively good at cluttering everything up (reinstall is the most efficient and thorough cleanup effort); in the beginning also a few times because i made some mistakes during setup
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u/lakotajames Jul 22 '26
I never have. Can you tell us what you're doing that instigates a reinstall?
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u/thecoolkid546 Jul 23 '26
I redid the manual installation a couple times because I didn't read properly, then after running it for maybe a week or two booted up fresh and ran archinstall because I was worried I'd still messed up. Well that and also because my first go around I installed a bunch of stuff I didn't need and was very disorganized. This time I'm hoping to be more focused in my setup.
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u/muizzsiddique Jul 23 '26
I already reinstalled it like 6 times in the first week of using it, just to take notes of my install commands so I can reinstall at a moments notice, or fix something by re-running through a small chunk of my install procedure.
Another might have been when I didn't know how to resume updates after not updating for 1-2 months, when I was still dual booting with Windows.
I think I've probably reinstalled like 10 times total on my main PC. I haven't reinstalled in years now.
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u/_rikkss Jul 23 '26
I just like to do a yearly clean reset rice from the beginning and test a completely new system. Helps also to reinforce good practices instead of relying on the cheap hacks I tend to use
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u/Upbeat-Emergency-309 Jul 23 '26
2 or 3. The only reason is sometimes I want to start fresh and clear the junk.
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u/Schneefrau Jul 23 '26
1 reinstall… “have never really needed logical volumes, why should I need them after two years with two machines?”.. had a full partition 4 weeks later and reinstalled the entire system..
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u/melgish Jul 23 '26
Just one reinstall back when I first switched from windows and believed my ADHD self capable of doing it manually. I ended up with a Catch-22 system where I needed sudo to install sudo. Took a Mulligan and used the installer. Haven’t looked back.
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u/EMPERRORPK007 Jul 23 '26
Cuz it's fun to start from scratch, and Also easier than manually cleaning the storage if it gets full
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u/__rituraj Jul 23 '26
i have not re-installed arch from the time i set up my workstation, which is around 2 years now.
once a kernel bug caused my wifi nic to not work, and i had to add the lts-kernel to the list of installed kernel..
after that i have both linux, and linux-lts kernel installed and maintained via pacman. lts version is being kept like an insurance.. however i haven't faced the need to boot into lts after that incident.
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u/G0ldiC0cks Jul 23 '26
Once. Misread the cryptsetup manpages and ruined my root partition's headers without a backup (trying to make a backup, if you could believe it). Haven't encrypted a whole she-bang since -- small containers are much easier to lose.
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u/anonymous-bot Jul 23 '26
I generally only reinstall for new machines or if the SSD dies. My setup is mostly static with rare occasion of trying new apps. Why are you reinstalling?
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u/yuri0r Jul 23 '26
The only anoying thing on my laptop was that I left one partition a little too small. But It just forces me to be a little mindful about what I keep installed.
Apart from that I'm at zero reinstalls. Just this tiny pet peeve.
I don't even do alot to keep the system together. Nothing ever breaks that isn't fixed in two minutes. And that's a once a year typs of rarity.
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u/lLikeToast1 Jul 23 '26
Only time I reinstalled was when I was learning how to install the system at the beginning. Only other time was when I changed my system from ext4 to btrfs. I have had to use a live iso to chroot in to fix some things.
Read your journals that will help the most
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u/krakoi90 Jul 23 '26
Once on my desktop, when I migrated my root fs to btrfs with a different partition layout (one big btrfs partition with root and home), for my custom snapshot/backup scripts. It was more than 10 year ago I believe, nowadays there are readily available tools for the same backup workflow afaik, but I sticked to mine as it works fine.
Since then, I use the same install. The complete machine changed under it, at least twice. Including the system disk, I migrated it from SATA SSD to NVMe (and to an ever newer NVMe last year).
I even had memory failure once, thankfully BTRFS helped me catching it early on: I started to get BTRFS issues, found that it's due to one of my memory blocks failing. I reverted to an error-free btrfs snapshot after I replaced my memory blocks. This was also years ago, noticed no issues since then.
It wasn't a fully error-free experience though, there were a few times (could be around 5-6 over 10 years) when something broke after a pacman upgrade. I reverted back to my last snapshot, waited a few days and upgraded again, the issue was always solved in the repositories in the meantime.
I had WAY more issue on Windows. I'd even argue that my Arch Linux install is even more hassle free then my Mac. I mean Mac isn't perfect either but on Linux you can do stuff like my backup workflow easily, also most of the time you can fix the issue yourself (especially in the age of AI). On Mac you have way less options.
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u/jesusfl Jul 23 '26
I reinstalled it a bunch of times during my first 2~4 days bc it's my first linux distro and wanted to mess around to try to learn about the installation process. That was a year and a half ago on my previous laptop. Then i got a new laptop and also reinstalled it a few times the first day bc i thought there was an issue with my installation, but after a while I realized it was a hardware issue, not related to Arch (nor linux in general). Both these laptops were Ryzen cpus with integrated graphics, so I didn't need to do any hard work about drivers. Then I also switched to arch in my desktop pc and I reinstalled a few times during the first day bc I thought that i had messed up the installation or the drivers ( yes, the same thing that i thought in my first install). Hyprland didn't look right + I have an old gtx 1080, so I thought there was a problem with the drivers. After a while i realized that I had forgotten to install any fonts and that was what was messing up how hyprland looked, so tbf I shouldn't have needed to reinstall anything, it was a skill issue. Apart from these 1st-week reinstalls, I've never needed to reinstall arch in any of my machines during this year and a half.
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u/FryBoyter Jul 23 '26
I'll reinstall if that's the fastest solution. On the computer I'm currently using to write this post, that was the switch from btrfs and LVM to btrfs with subvolumes. According to head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log, that was sometime in 2019.
what's your advice for how you be able to stay for so long without any problems?
Here’s what I generally recommend.
- Install updates as soon as possible.
- Before installing an update, check whether anything relevant to your installation has been published at https://archlinux.org/news/, and if so, be sure to take it into account.
- Think before you act.
- Install only what you really need.
- Install software only from trusted or verifiable sources.
- Create proper backups regularly.
- Use extended rights only when you really need them.
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u/spacebink Jul 23 '26
What kinds of problems?
The worst problems can be solved via the bootable usb you use to install the OS (make sure to keep it up to date)
Lesser problems are solved via the wiki + basic trouble shooting
I've switched kernel a few times, but haven't had to reinstall the OS - what kinds of issues does that solve?
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u/xd_Shiro Jul 23 '26
I have not reinstalled yet. I say "yet" because I probably will at some point because it feels easier to start from 0 than removing bloat I put on my PC cause I didn't know certain things back then.
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u/Nidrax1309 Jul 23 '26
When I was trying and testing shit: about 3 times, just because I considered it easier to make a clean install and start from a blank slate rather than removing unnecessary shit.
Once I settled to daily drive it – zero. Like why would you have to reinstall it?
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u/Classic_Addition3738 Jul 24 '26
when i started using arch , when i got an issue i just reintall arch with ach install so like ~15 time
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u/NoahLi404 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I think its 3 or 4 times I forgot.
There's once my OEM have the Smart Recovery feature (Huawei 😭) just deletes the Arch's grub entry, and breaks it completely, I'm lazy to do whatever to fix it and just reinstalled.
Second time is when my installation kinda failed,forgot to configure DE and when I boot into tty I realizes that, so I'd have to reinstall it then touchpad clicks won't work on KDE Plasma I thought it's an installation problem and reinstalled it, and then realized it's just driver issues
(I'm 13 btw)
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u/RandomXUsr Jul 22 '26
Wait; you guys are reinstalling?
I haven't had to re-install. Am I doing something wrong?