Linux

Yes, that should work, but as someone who went through that phase before BTRFS was a thing keeping /home in a separate partition helps quite a lot, because then reinstalling the system is just a 15 min afair and you're mostly back where you were before except some programs you might have installed that you will need to do so again.

The next logical step for me was to keep a list of those programs, so I could just run a single command and get all of them installed. That eventually evolved into convincing me to use Gentoo, since it has this concept baked into the system. But compiling everything wasn't for me, so I went back to Arch where I stayed for over a decade. And even though I almost never broke my system again, I always had that fear. I even switched to BTRFS when it became more stable, but never had to use a snapshot, so can't help you on how much it restores.

Recently I've migrated to NixOS, and I'm very happy with it. The appeal of it for me was how the system is declared, which is a very advanced version of my packages in a file that also includes configurations. This makes it so that making changes to your system requires you to modify those files and rebuild your system, and at boot time you can select from the previous generations of the system in case you broke something. In short, this makes your system unbreakable because worst case scenario you boot into the previous generation that worked and figure out what you did wrong.

That being said, it's learning curve is very steep, but the payoff for those of us who like to tinker is huge. If you're interested I recommend checking vimjoyer's YouTube channel, he has several videos about it, and since you're already used to running things in VMs to test it should be easy for you to get started. And the best thing is that once you're done with configuring the VM, almost the exact same config would work on your main machine out of the box and give you the exact same system (the only caveat is that there's one file that relates to hardware which would have to be different, but it gets auto-generated during the install process).

Yeah I guess if you’re constantly slamming your penis in the car door than having a button that turns back time would be one approach.

Snapshots seem an ideal tool for the job. It won't replace a full backup system, but as long as the cost of failure (such as you mistyping a command and nuking the disk's partition data or something) is only a few hours of OS reconfiguration rather than losing priceless family photos, it should work.

I use btrfs snapshots on my system. When I'm about to do something "risky" (e.g. trying out kde or cosmic) I take a snapshot beforehand. Then when I want to go back, I just restore the snapshot and reboot.

For /home, there won't be a lot of OS configuration there, and if it's a burner machine you probably won't have much personalisation done on it. However, if you want to backup configuration there, look into a dotfile manager.

Yes, but there is something important to remember.

By default, most Linux installs put there kernels in /boot, which is not on the btrfs partition. This is not an issue on distros that keep multiple kernel versions, but it can cause issues on distros that only provide one kernel version (Arch and Arch based distros).

Because the kernels are not stored on the btrfs partition, they are not restored by btrfs snapshots. And if the rest of the system, including kernel modules, are a mismatched version due to restoration, then it means your system is unbootable.

A simpler fix is to install ArchLinux's linux-tls package, which is the stable version of Linux that doesn't update constantly.

But what I do to get around this, I put /boot on the btrfs partition, and /boot/efi is the seperate efi partition where grub is installed. Then, kernels are restored when I restore a snapshot.

This is what openSUSE Tumbleweed is designed to do, although config files in /home require manual setup to include. It allows you to completely rollback if necessary after a system upgrade, allowing you to use a bleeding edge distro without fear of having an unusuable system. If an upgrade goes bad, usual procedure is to roll back to the last btrfs snapshot and just wait for the fix (which usually comes in a couple days to a week, as Tumbleweed advances rather quickly).

openSUSE has a specific btrfs subvolume setup and grub/systemd-boot integration to enable this, which is not too common even today, so it really is a bit special in that you can have this functionality without excessive time spent setting it up manually.

While this doesn't answer your question, I use Docker for this exact purpose, since you can throw away everything if it fails, whilst keeping a recipe for success documented in a Dockerfile.

Yes. Snapshot...make your changes... Try the system...and if it is messed use the old snapshot.

If you try tumbleweed the snapshots are also integrated to the grub menu so you can boot to any snapshot, and if you like the one you booted to you issue sudo snapper rollback and that makes your current snapshot the default.

It also has auto snapshots anytime you use the GUI yast tools, or other CLI tools like zypper, so you don't have to manually created snapshots. Also has cleanup schedule to remove old snaphots either by date or number of snapshots

If you keep within the file system (e.g. don't format anything or write to the device itself), are capable of executing a few commands in a terminal, and know how to boot from a live linux in case something goes wrong, you should be fine using snapshots, I'd say

Yes, it does. i recently installed a bunch on crap and decided I don't need any of it, so I just rolled back to the snapshot I created manually, before starting the process and my system was simply restored.

Just keep one thing in mind, rolling back automatically makes the filesystem read only so You need to remount.

The snapshot approach works, but there is a trap nobody mentions: most people set up btrfs after the system is already installed, so the first快照 only captures whatever state they reached after those multiple failed attempts. The real win is snapshotting before you touch anything at all, ideally right after a fresh install when things actually work. Rolling back to a known-good state beats googling the same error message for the third time.

Usually, under btrfs filesystems containing system data you can get snapshots and rollback flawlessly, but some subfilesystems do not get those snapshots by default, like /var/log or /home, so you may need to set them up in order to enable snapshots, and manually create one when you start tinkering with your system. You then can revert the full snapshot, or even individual files