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I adore Timeshift. It has made my time on Linux so much more trouble free. I have used Linux for 10+ years but over the I have spent hours, days and weeks tryi

I adore Timeshift. It has made my time on Linux so much more trouble free. I have used Linux for 10+ years but over the I have spent hours, days and weeks trying to undo or fix little issues I introduce by tinkering around with things. Often I seem to break things at the worst times, right as I am starting to work on some new project or something that is time sensitive. Now, I can just roll back to an earlier stable version if I don't want to spend the time right then on troubleshooting. I've enabled this on all my family members machines and teach them to just roll back when Linux goes funky.

pmarreck 2y ago
While it's not quite average-user-friendly (YET), one of the reasons I switched to NixOS is because it provides this out-of-the-box. I was frustrated with every other Linux for the reasons you cite, but NixOS I can deal with, since 1) screwing up the integrity of a system install is hard to begin with, 2) if you DO manage to do it, you can reboot into any of N previous system updates (where you set N). Linux is simultaneously the most configurable and the most brittle OS IMHO. NixOS takes away all the brittleness and leaves all the configurability, with the caveat that you have to declaratively configure it using the Nix DSL.
- rrix2 2y ago
  NixOS also has out of the box support for zfs auto snapshots, where you can tell it to keep 3 months, four weeks, 24 hourly, and frequent snapshots evert fifteen minutes so you can time shift your home directory, too
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    I'm zfs on root and haven't set that up yet! I should
gooseyman 2y ago
I enabled this four months ago and I have had the same experience. It’s not that I couldn’t retype the config file I accidentally wrote over while tinkering, but I like the safety that comes with Timeshift to try and fail a few times. Hard lessons come hard. This softens those lessons a little while maintaining the learning.

pmarreck 2y ago

While it's not quite average-user-friendly (YET), one of the reasons I switched to NixOS is because it provides this out-of-the-box. I was frustrated with every other Linux for the reasons you cite, but NixOS I can deal with, since 1) screwing up the integrity of a system install is hard to begin with, 2) if you DO manage to do it, you can reboot into any of N previous system updates (where you set N). Linux is simultaneously the most configurable and the most brittle OS IMHO. NixOS takes away all the brittleness and leaves all the configurability, with the caveat that you have to declaratively configure it using the Nix DSL.

rrix2 2y ago
NixOS also has out of the box support for zfs auto snapshots, where you can tell it to keep 3 months, four weeks, 24 hourly, and frequent snapshots evert fifteen minutes so you can time shift your home directory, too
- pmarreck 2y ago
  I'm zfs on root and haven't set that up yet! I should

gooseyman 2y ago

I enabled this four months ago and I have had the same experience. It’s not that I couldn’t retype the config file I accidentally wrote over while tinkering, but I like the safety that comes with Timeshift to try and fail a few times. Hard lessons come hard. This softens those lessons a little while maintaining the learning.