The beloved lightweight distro
I often go through this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks
You can quickly remove all unused packages with this command: (from the article above)
pacman -Qdtq | pacman -Rns -
My arch install is many years old, I don't feel the need to re-install.
My arch install is 10 years old at this point.
I would be interested to know what inspired the need to "feel fresh" from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can't handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as "needing a cleanup" ?
If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).
Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands.
"Qdtq" means "Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet" ("quiet" makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them
"Rns" means "Remove, no backup, recursively" . and the - at the end means "Use the values from the first half of the pipe"... This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.
For this command, a "dependency" is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn't been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.
This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.
But overall, there's very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.
But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.
Thanks for writing this response so I don't need to spend the time and efforts you did to write it :) Hopefully OP find it useful.
I'm in the same boat. I'm running the same Arch for 15 years now. The only cleaning is for old packages and config files. Also, if you remove the packages correctly, the maintenance should be minimal.
There should be no need to do a fresh install of the OS. This is another great benefit versus others. Even when I change my machine, I just install an image of my old system so it's fully functional right away.
I guess it is better to spend some little time cleaning up your existing install than doing a fresh one. From what you describe, you just have some leftover configuration files you can delete.
Fresh installs is needed when you messed up your current install with broken packages or missing ones or missing configuration and you just don't know how to clean it up.
So as long as you can clean up your install, just clean it.
I agree and clicked to say the same thing, until I read "I'm scared of breaking something" - if you want to get good at Linux, then do what you're scared of, and break things, because that is how you learn.
If you do not want to - which is 100% perfectly fine and acceptable - not everyone has to be a Linux expert and some people do just want to use it - then I wouldn't bother unless there is a specific need.
My longest running Arch install was 6yo. I cleaned it up every so often (old configs, left over packages, old caches, etc) but beyond that it really didn't need a reinstall. It never got slow over time (unlike Windows). At worst, I would sometimes delete confif files if there were major changes just so I could start fresh with a particular package/app.
In fact, it would have gone longer but I built a new PC. On that PC my Arch install was 4yo before I took the plunge to try CachyOS.
If it is working then there is no need for a reinstall. If you cannot live without it for a day then you might want to not mess with it.
At the same time this is Arch so you can create a new partition and install from your current system into that. And only switch over when you are happy with it. It can be useful to go through the install process occasionally to ensure you can still set it up if something ever does happen to your system. Or to ensure you are configuring things with the latest recommended settings and packages.
But there is no need to wipe your current system to go through that process.
If this guy follows the rabbit hole he'll soon be using NixOS with Impermanence and wiping to a clean setup every reboot.
Having a single file config simplifies backups and that's tempting but I don't want to lose the arch wiki (I know some info is general to Linux but some isn't), AUR and other stuff that I miss once I lose it to an even more niche OS. I can try it on a virtual machine at some point
I hear you. No distro has anything compared to Arch's wiki, and NixOS' documentation is currently mixed at best. For what it's worth, NixOS' package repository is comparable to the AUR. I have yet to run into anything I use on AUR that isn't available in the official NixOS package repository.
Maybe blendOS
I reinstall my system almost every 5 months, idk why but seeing my system has more than 1200+ packages installed it bugging me so much so I wipe everything and reinstall
Oh, then the most heavy version of Garuda Linux is for you. I think it used to come with close to 2000
