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Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by unshavedyak on Monday January 23, 2023 @12:03PM (#34491596)
My problem is i don't know what gets borked immediately after updating unless it's catastrophic. Ie i've gone a fair bit of time before i realized some specific functionality of some program no longer works due to some unrelated change in an underlying dependency that i was unaware of. Oof.

Granted Btrfs sounds great though, i've not used that. It would certainly help.

Re:Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduct... by seanw444 on Monday January 23, 2023 @12:16PM (#34491796)
Yeah that's true. That's where the "largely" part of my comment does some work.

I just take occasional snapshots before I do things that I'm concerned may be catastrophic. But it definitely won't catch everything. It helps that I run Arch, and I update packages once a day, which only leaves me with under 40 (small) packages usually. So a quick cursory glance at which ones are updating usually tells me what to be cautious of. Display driver update, kernel update, etc.

If I'm not sure what went wrong, but I at least have a working snapshot, then I can get done what I need to get done, and then go back to troubleshooting. Rather than just having a broken system regardless.