I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must go… except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldn’t let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well I’m pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
Around 2007 I had a Windows laptop die on me and drove me to device agnosticism. Maybe I learned the wrong lesson but now I keep my OS and data separate enough that a b0rked OS is an hour’s inconvenience instead of a day’s recovery.
Still, it’s pretty awesome that you can just shuck a drive into a totally new machine and only have to adjust network settings.