Yet Windows will let you roll back an upgrade with a single click within 10 days.

Of course anyone can restore from backups. It's a pain and it's time consuming.

My post serves more as a warning to those who may develop buyer's remorse.

You might like snapshot based solutions like Snapper

I once tried Spiral Linux, light fork of Sid with bundled Snapper stack. Switched to a giant-userbase distro, Fedora, mostly because Plasma was bad with 5k screens. Are there mainstream distros with easy rollback?

openSUSE should be one of them.

as much as I love Debian (been a faithful user since 25 years or so, no more Windows at home since then), that Windows ability is just really cool and Debian is still not on par I believe...

You know imaging your machine is still an option...

But you can't do that on a live system as you can with Windows or macOS. Not a problem for pre release upgrade perhaps. But I'm so missing this feature from macOS.

You can if you're using LVM. Take a snapshot of the logical volume your system is on, then run `dd' against the snapshot, as it's essentially a frozen point-in-time.

I've used this trick many times in a live, rw environment.

Depends on your filesystem. For example, I certainly can as I’m using btrfs. I’m also using Timeshift for easy management of snapshots. As others have mentioned, there are other choices too like Snapper that all work well.

You can snapshot the filesystem if you're using BTRFS, ZFS, or another Copy-on-Write filesystem.

I always find the rough edges on upgrading windows (and macos), I've had several computers that take 3-4 hours to hit a roadblock, give a inscrutable error message and rollback. I feel spoiled using nixos (once you get over the learning curve)

Linux Mint offers rollbacks, I have snapshots going back a point release and a major version.

This is what LVM/btrfs/ZFS snapshots were invented for.

Windows is using Volume Shadow Copies, which for the purposes of this discussion, you can think of as roughly equivalent.

If you keep your /home on a separate partition, you can basically reinstall a whole system without much efforts. It's good to do that from time to time. etckeeper is very helpful too. Lots of desktop apps are AppImage nowadays, so if you keep them in the home directory, they'll persist.