LoL my current Gentoo system was installed like 12 years ago and moved on 5 different hardware platforms without a proper reinstall.

I have said myself to never peek in the /etc directory for any reason! 😅

I thought the point of Linux was not doing this every year like with Windows?

For me it’s installing a new OS every six months for a fun new experience.

Then there’s me, reinstalling the OS because it’s quicker than installing the three months’ worth of updates I forgot about.

I thought we ditched Windows because we were tired of doing that?

So am I the only one distro hopping for fun?

Why would you reinstall NixOS, like, ever?

Heck even moving it to another partition isn’t really a re-install as it’ll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you’ll have to move over /home manually, though).

And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc’ed the old stuff. It’s practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it’s installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.

Oh just one thing: Don’t skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you’ll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.