It's Time to Wipe my Desktop

I said before it’s a good idea to wipe your personal computer, and I stand by it. Starting fresh is good, but the ability to do so when you need to, and having the confidence that you know what to do and where your important files and configurations are, is priceless.

Restoring from backup is an option and it’s good if something happens and you want to continue quickly where you left off, but I’m talking about virtual house cleaning. It’s not about restoring everything so it’s the same, it’s restoring the things you need while letting those you forgot about decay into dust of 1s and 0s, designated as empty space, until they are overwritten again with useful information.

There are also other reasons for the wipe. Kubuntu’s next LTS, 26.04 is out, making my current one obsolete. I now have a countdown notifying me how many days of supported security patches I have left. It comes with Wayland, which will give me more control over my new screen, and supposedly some gaming improvements. Another reason is to organize my program and configs (dot files) better with Emacs. I want to create documentation in Denote for GUI settings, or use tangle and write the config directly with explanations of what does what and why in a similar fashion to my Emacs configuration.

The biggest concern is the things I don’t know I need to save. My dad used to say this to me when we left home back in the day: “Good to go? Forgot all the things you’re supposed to remember and remember all the things you were supposed to forget?” It’s kind of fitting right now. I use all kinds of shortcuts scripts and programs that I forgot I installed at some point, and while reinstalling is an option, some configs are more complicated than others. Then of course there are chat logs, emails I saved locally… So what I think I will do is one final local backup of everything, and then wipe.

The last thing is time. Getting everything up and running will take a while, especially if I document everything I need to do. Emacs first, of course.