Background:
Typically when I’m trying something new on Linux, I search for an online guide that doesn’t assume I’m already an expert and looks like it should be easy enough for a pleb like myself to follow. Whatever it is I’m trying to do, it usually takes me multiple tries to get it right. Sometimes, when I’m venturing into new territory, I’ll derp around in a VM so I can take snapshots and then revert to the last good snapshot when something inevitably goes wrong. This approach works well for me most of the time.
But every now and then, I don’t want to use a VM, I want to use a spare laptop that I have lying around, “bare metal” if you will. It just feels more… authentic? My hesitation w/ practicing on spare laptops is that when I mess it up, the only way I know how to start over with a clean slate is to reinstall the OS and try again. This approach is not ideal b/c I mess up a lot - this is a fact of my life - and reinstalling the OS after every mistake takes a lot of time, to the point that I just stop persuing whatever project I was working on.
Question:
Is this a good use case for btrfs? How easy is it for a pleb like myself to take snapshots and then roll back to the previous state after jacking up a config file in /home or /etc or something?
Take a look here, it explains more about the specific configuration, such as which subvolumes are automatically snapshotted and include in rollbacks, bootloader integration, etc https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/snapper/
Basically there are many details in the setup of btrfs that are needed to get to that level where you can be confident of being able to easily rollback to a previous state. After losing some data on a manually configured btrfs setup on Fedora I went to openSUSE specifically because they have already done all the hard work for you on the btrfs config
Funny enough I went to Fedora because it did all the pre-configuration to setup disk encryption unlike all of the Debian based distros I tried; not even Ubuntu had it.
In my recent experience, I’m pretty sure all distros I tried (Debian, Bazzite, openSUSE) had a simple checkbox to do full disk encryption.
i was under the same impression as well; but no, all of the distros i tried on my new laptop (various different ubuntu flavors and some others i don’t remember) didn’t have it.
i’m capable to doing it myself, but fedora’s installer let me simply check a box for it.
That’s odd. Maybe it’s a limitation with Ubuntu or their downstream distros. I’m now positive that all 3 of those distros I listed gave me the option to encrypt the disk during installation. This was in the last 3 months or so.
i dug through my downloads because it bugged me that i couldn’t remember and it was ubuntu 24.04, kubuntu 25.10, fedora-kde 43, and mint 22.2 cinnamon that didn’t give the option and it was back in august.
Interesting, thanks. Maybe it’s something with the entire Ubuntu branch.