This installation of arch is 2 years old at this point and there’s nothing wrong with it and I want to do a clean reinstall to feel more fresh. But I’ve been constantly delaying it for a long time because I’m scared breaking something and also not having my laptop fully functional for even a day isn’t a pleasant thought.
The benefits I think is being able to handpick which files I want to keep and which packages I would reinstall since the thought of how many files and packages are left over from when I momentarily needed them is really unpleasent. But this habit of reinstalling the OS as a cleanup method might be a bad one I’ve brought myself from the time I used windows which was justified back then but it may no longer be here since I can achieve what I want with a much more simple and less risky method
So am I being an idiot here? Or should I go for it?
Edit: I do have bleachbit but the benefit of a reinstall is that only system files, essential packages and my personal files are kept (actually copied out, formatted and copied back in for my files). These two aren’t the same
Edit 2: Thank you everyone for their answers, it’s clear that I don’t have that much reason to wipe my system at the moment. It might be a better learning experience to look for orphan files and packages
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.