Reading this I feel blessed having found https://universal-blue.org

Don't understand the downvotes.

Ublue family of atomic os, provides snapshot restore which helps exactly in these scenarios.

You don't need a special OS to have backups or even just btrfs/lvm snapshots.

Similarly, Trixie contains an updated version of Dovecot that (even though the version number seems to indicate otherwise) has a new configuration format that is not backwards compatible. This is clearly stated in the release notes but may be surprising nevertheless.

Can't you install the drivers from nVidia directly?

I tried, but it fails at compile time and I can't be bothered to try and understand why it doesn't find a stdargs.h that is _clearly_ there. I attempted various solutions I found online for half a day, then just threw the towel and ordered a 25€ replacement from AMD which I'm told has better support than nvidia on linux anyway.

Ah, yeah, that tracks. I've heard the same, though I haven't replaced my nVidia yet.

For this exact reason I enable Timeshift on every computer I run. If an upgrade fails spectacularly like that, recovering and reverting to the old edition is as simple as picking a pre-upgrade snapshot from the boot menu.

If you're not on btrfs, I'm sure there are similar tools for your favorite file system. For me, it's been a life saver.

how much space does that take up for you?

At least for btrfs, very little.

It's also almost instantaneous.

You can think about it like this: the snapshot creates a bunch of hard links to the existing files. So every file basically has 2 pointers to it.

The upgrade now updates the files in the non- snapshot paths, creating new files/keeping the snapshots on the original file. (That's afaik why it's called a CoW filesystem - copy on write)

Now, every changed file will be stored "twice", but all unchanged files are still only on the disk once.

As most upgrades still keep the majority of all files unchanged, there is effectively little space used for the snapshot

definitely going to check that out, thanks

OpenSUSE has this sort of thing configured by default using BTRFS and snapper. Automatically creates copy-on-write snapshots before and after every time you use the package manager. I think this should be the default on most end-user oriented distros.

Fwiw there's a really nice write-up on how Steam Deck does A/B updates, using rayc and casync/desync. https://github.com/randombk/steamos-teardown/blob/master/doc...

Also Collabora had a nice update on tuning work they did. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/stea...

I'm a little surprised they use casync and multiple partitions, given that root is on btrfs. As they have it is more reliable if anything does go bad, so makes sense, but: given that steam decks are on a given snapshot of the btrfs system, it seems like they could just send an incremental update to the next release and try to boot that. Oh ah, that breaks down if, like me, you disable the readonly root.

If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway? Regardless, you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace. It should install cleanly once you add the Bookworm repos, and you'd be fully supported for quite some time thanks to LTS. It would technically be a FrankenDebian, but one that might be quite acceptable nonetheless.

> If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway?

Normally they would probably be, but it looks like my ultra-wide screen is too much to handle for those drivers.

> you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace.

Good idea indeed. But at this point I'm afraid of borking everything again. I'll just wait for the replacement card I ordered and hope it doesn't make things worse.

> If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway

Unfortunately, nouveau is very limited and barely works (when it works).

Especially on older cards actually! The new hardware, since the 3000 generation or so, moved some "secret sauce" (probably bullshit) into the firmware so that everything that the drivers need to do is something that Nvidia is willing to disclose, so there can be open source drivers that can get the hardware out of low power mode. That lack of "reclocking" crippled performance with nouveau.

Eh, I'd still buy AMD if possible.

I have too developed PTSD from nvidia + debian (even worse, nvidia optimus on a laptop).

To the point where I would not upgrade my system for months at a time, when I was in the midst of important work, because I didn't want to spend a day on tty trying to make the DE work again.

In the words of Linus: FUCK NVIDIA

See https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_13_.22T... for proprietary Nvidia drivers on Trixie