If my Linux install died tomorrow, these are the first 7 things I'd reinstall

Published Sep 11, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path. Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. No user of any operating system wants to entertain the thought of a complete rebuild when things are going well, but sometimes disaster strikes. I haven't had to deal with this myself on Linux, but it could happen at any time: a failing drive, a botched update, a partition table incorrectly configured, and plenty of other modes of failure exist and happen to users everyday. These are the 7 things I'd reinstall and reconfigure first if my install were suddenly nuked. My dotfiles, pulled from Git An underrated backup This is the only item on this list that isn't really a piece of software, but instead, a collection of files. A dotfiles repository just acts as a quick way to restore all the configuration files that live in my home directory. They represent months of small changes I've made over a period of months, usually in the form of the shell and its aliases, the prompt, my terminal emulator's settings, editor configuration, and the desktop tweaks that squelch annoyances that drop up due to defaults. It's first on the list for good reason. Everything below this is faster to set up once the shell behaves exactly like I expect it to, because configuring a system through a prompt you're not intimately familiar with can slow you down immensely. Setting up a private dotfiles repo is one of the cheapest insurance policies in Linux, and it's a thing most people don't think about until it's too late. A password manager and browser sync Nonnegotiables for getting everything else back online Dotfiles get the terminal back, but what about everything else? A password vault is the next essential, because nothing else can be used until I have all my logins. Restoring that is the second order of business, right before installing my browser. Browser sync is the other part of this that's just as important, and I personally rely on Brave's sync for this. A simple passphrase that can be copied from my phone and every part of the browser is synced as it is on every other system. Snapshots Included on some, but not all distros Snapshots are integral in avoiding a disaster with your Linux install in the first place, but whether you need to do this at all depends heavily on what you installed. openSUSE has shipped Snapper on Btrfs by default for years, and several Arch-derived distributions follow suit. On my distro of choice, CachyOS, snap-pac is already bracketing every pacman transaction with pre and post-snapshots before you touch anything. Linux Mint installs Timeshift but leaves the configuration to you, which catches people who click through the welcome screen without much thought. And then there's Fedora, which has defaulted to Btrfs for years while shipping no snapshot tooling whatsoever, so you get the filesystem's capabilities and none of its convenience until you set it up yourself. The GPU stack Usually not the driver, but everything else The driver itself isn't a concern on any modern distro. The vast majority of the time, a functional, up-to-date driver is included with your distro install, so it isn't necessary to install one. The surrounding tooling is what I'm worried about after a fresh install. LACT is the piece I'd want back immediately. It's a single graphical interface for monitoring, fan curves, power limits, and clock control, and it spans AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel hardware. The NVIDIA side has expanded considerably, picking up PowerMizer mode for forcing the card into its highest performance state and a voltage boost slider that the developers compare directly to the equivalent in MSI Afterburner. Blackwell cards specifically got corrected hotspot temperature readings and per-chip memory temperature sensors, which matters if you're on a 50-series card like I am. Mesh VPN client A must to access the other devices on my network Now that my install is in working order, it's time to connect it to the other things that matter. In my case, this is with NetBird. A mesh VPN client puts the fresh install back on the same overlay network as everything else I own, like my other devices, my home lab, and phone. Without it, I'm essentially cut off from my self-hosted services and my NAS, so this is a must. Flatpak and Flatseal Flatpaks are essential, but Flatseal is needed to configure them properly Flatseal is a permissions editor for Flatpaks, so this entry is really both things, though on distributions that ship Flatpak configured the install is a single package. The sandboxing Flatpak provides is genuinely useful but also opaque. Flatseal makes it much more legible, exposing filesystem access, device access, sockets, and environment variables in an interface you can actually read, rather than requiring you to hand-edit override files. The example that comes up constantly is an application that can't see a drive mounted outside your home directory, which is a one-click toggle with Flatseal. Btop My favorite monitoring program The last thing I'd install isn't something I'd consider essential, but it's something I use a lot. Btop is a task manager-esque application that shows you pretty much everything you need to know in regard to the hardware on your system. Idle CPU and memory baseline are what I'm eyeing first after a fresh install, but it's great for seeing temperatures, I/O, network status, and other performance metrics. A list you hope you'll never have to use If you take one thing from this, make it the first item. A dotfiles repository is the simplest way to restore core functionality of the terminal and desktop, and it only takes a few moments to setup. Everything else, including applications, can be replaceable within an hour or two. Configuration decisions aren't, and sometimes it takes months to surface a change you made before things went really wrong.