Originally posted by: JoLLyRoGer
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Correction: Figure out what broke and why, then learn how to fix it.
Ideally, yes, but the first few times you break thing's it's a real pain to figure out why it's broke and a reinstallation is simply quicker. If you don't know the system you won't figure it out and having someone tell you "You forgot to update libgconf2-4" doesn't mean much.
While this is true it will ultimately cheat the user out of a valuable learning experience. As with anything new, it takes time and it's slow going at first. The open source community is a vast place and that said, there is not much one can break that someone else hasn't broken before. To spend a little extra time researching out how to recover from mistakes is to truely learn the system.