Annual clean installs
So I have a philosophy about how to do Linux right. I'm a daily user, literally 100% of my work is done on a Linux laptop--my writing, personal and commercial, photo editing, retro gaming, and so on. And I have come to be a firm believer in formatting the root file system once in a while, so to speak. I think the reliable way to clean up a Linux system is to reinstall it.
I was taught by two old Unix guys, my grandfather, who'd used aging PDP's for molecular analysis at USM back in the early 80's, and my uncle, who was a Vax sysop for Haliburton around the same time. One thing they had a peculiar insistence on was that /home should never be on the root partition. In my early Linux days, running Ubuntu 12 and 13 as a kid and messing around in Python and Bash, I never manually partitioned a drive. My grandfather did that for me, and he knew how to set up a dual boot with Windows much better than I do now. Now my grandfather is... well, he doesn't talk much sense these days, and I caught him about to delete system files off the last laptop the university issued him before he lost his job. He thought they were a virus.
But I caught on eventually. Arch tutorials told me that there were vague reasons to use a separate home partition. I had thought it was just tradition: old Unix systems had two "winchesters." One was for the root partition, one was to store the large home directories of potentially dozens of users. But there's another reason: for you to regularly reinstall your system files.
This morning I had a few hours to kill before work, and I'd had this on my chest for a while. My Arch system on my laptop was getting bloated. Too many programs I wasn't using. I was using an AUR helper that doesn't do cleanup of compile-time dependencies, for one thing. And key programs I was using from the AUR were deprecated. Also, I wanted to get systemd out of my life.
So I wrote down all the programs I'd need to reproduce my existing desktop setup (i3-gaps, pcmanfm, and so on) and then backed up my home partition to a spare HDD, and over the course of two hours installed Artix completely fresh on the root partition. By the end of the second hour I had my entire setup restored, but over Artix instead of Arch, with none of the bloat.
Next year about this time, I'm going to reinstall Artix freshly. If I don't think to reinstall a program, I probably don't need it taking up space on my hard drive. Think of it like a sort of cyber-Marie Kondo method.
Does anyone else do fresh installs on about a yearly basis?