Hello, I’ve been a long time Linux user but I had a 5 years break and I am coming back to it now.
I’ve been trying several Linux distributions in the past week, installing the packages and configuring them as I need with several different orders of success.
My last case was an Ubuntu installation that I was very happy with and pretty close to call it setup and done, until I installed virtualbox and restarted the system only to find it bricked.
Obviously I could try to drop into one of the terminals on ctrl + alt + Fx and fix it, but I wonder if I could be smarter about it and be more prepared for this kind of situation.
One of the starting points I think would be having a separate home partition from the rest of the system. I used to have it in the past and it was great.
But then what’s next? What are the best FS I could pick for each type of partition? A performant one to keep the code and package manager cache, a journaling/snapshop based one for system, another type for game data, etc etc.
What if I would like to have a snapshot of working version of my system backed up somewhere ready to restore as simple as simple as possible?
How do you configure your systems in order to quickly recover from an unexpected bricking without growing some more white hairs, and squeezing as much performance vs feature for each of your use case?
Besides btrfs, there are immutable distros like fedora silverblue. The system doesn’t update when something goes wrong during the update and you can roll back if it updated.
It is a bit more difficult to handle and understand, imo, for a new linux user if the user wants to tinker with the system.
I’ve been using NixOS and I’ve never had to worry about my system, because even if I did break it I can just wipe it and reinstall from my config files and it’ll be almost exactly the same as before.
MX Linux is good for this too with their iso maker .
I started using MX and just use their image tool to make installable live USB. But tbh I have tried installing with it yet.
The only thing I’ve used for back up is clonezilla and have actually recovered with it… just a regular full disk image.
Such a cool distro surprised I just started using it. Fedora was my go to for years before.