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.
Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old … Skylake seems recent to me and that’s the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.
I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because that’s how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. It’s only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their “trusted computing” bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.
I am not nearly organized enough for a long install
That’s one thing I don’t like about modern Linux is how it names network interfaces.
I miss the old eth0,1,3 or wlan0,1,2 etc.
Advanced windows users are going to be checking you out
linux is boring
now.FTFY :)
I once put an HDD into a completely new machine with all new hardware (same architecture, though), and it booted without any issues whatsoever. Must be 15-20 years ago but I still remember the new machine.
Linux always was exceptionally great when it comes to hardware changes after installation.
Glad to hear of this success story, never reinstall a perfectly crafted OS!
I’m going to do the same later this year as like you my setup is 10 years plus, though I’ll re-install Arch again What MB, GPU card etc did you buy? , as I’m out of touch with the latest equipment now, so would be grateful for a heads up
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I like your build a lot. Don’t forget to move your OS to another drive via clone or something occasionally… Your old drive will wear out eventually. If it’s SSD, they often just work until they just don’t, so it’s not like the old days when an HDD would just slow down and give you a warning.
Cheers!
Thank you :) I tried to be reasonable with it, it’s all too easy to break the bank haha. I have two “system” ssds that replicates itself with a weekly rsync job, and the larger storage SSD has an even larger SATA HDD it syncs to. Good looking out!
So about that. I don’t use rsync, but any regular bulk reads/writes will wear an SSD quickly!
What I meant was, if your drive(a) isn’t new with the new build, I would recommend it. I’ve been seeing failure rates on SSDs with hard use (like weekly backups) at only the 3-5 year mark. And usually when they die its all at once.
No worries, it’s all good! It’s basically two identical drives. The backup drive doesn’t get much use outside of the rsync process, but if the main drive fails, I am able to jump onto to the backup drive without much interruption. Before rsync runs it does a comparison and only moves modified files, so it’s not a bulk rewrite every week- just brings the target up to parity with the source. If both of these drives kick the bucket at the same time I guess that will just have to accept it as very bad luck lol, only so much I can do. But the plan is when the main drive fails, backup will get promoted to main until I’m able to backfill another drive.
