Comment 2 for bug 23050

"we'd much rather fix ..." I can understand that from a development point of view (and I program for a living). But from a desktop user perspective it is more deterministic to be able to reinstall or install a new release. One of the worst aspect of windows is that it gets into some unknown state and the cost of reinstall - bringing things back to a deterministic state- is excruciatingly painful. To frame it another way, the question is one of trust. I cannot trust my windows XP system to be in a clean bugfree, not-infected state. And if something goes wrong, I know people who go out and buy a new computer.

So why not make it an option to 1) set up a user data partition. 2) write all changes to the user data partition (the output of synaptics, apt-get). a script for user and group creation etc. 3) create a mechanism where I can do a new install, then point to my user partition and have all the synaptics pkgs reinstalled.

BTW, I just got an email about this today, so I'm responding now.
Thanks