I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 year ago

    Tumbleweed solves the first issue as well by running BTRFS by default on root with snapper configured. I’ve done a few rollbacks in the 3-4 years I’ve used it, and it’s way better than trying to fix an Arch system with pacman. I could get the same effect with Arch, but most users aren’t going to consider BTRFS or ZFS on root with Arch (I had BTRFS on /home on Arch, but that didn’t help much).

    What about LVM snapshots? I assume everyone sets up LVM nowadays anyway.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      I don’t think I’ve heard of any distro doing that. Maybe it’s more common in the server space, but LVM is usually only used for encryption and maybe RAID in the desktop space, and even RAID is pretty rare these days.

      I personally have one large BTRFS partition for my desktop OS with sub volumes for a few mount points. I used to have /home on a separate partition, but I made / too small and needed to micromanage it, so I decided to just go with one partition on the next install.

      I’m not familiar with how LVM snapshots work with BTRFS subvolumes, but I’m guessing it would just snapshot the whole partition. I use BTRFS for other reasons as well, so it just doesn’t make much sense to me to do it differently, and why would I when Tumbleweed does it for me?

      I do use LVM for encryption, but that’s it.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        any distro doing that

        I meant manually from the cli. I’m not aware of any GUI tools having support for the special LVM features either.

        • @[email protected]
          1•1 year ago

          I’m not talking about GUI tools, I’m talking about package manager integration. On openSUSE, if I do a zypper upgrade, it’ll create a BTRFS snapshot so I don’t need to think about it. It goes a step further and adds it to a few other commands too AFAIK, so there’s a good chance that I’ll have a recent snapshot for / if a configuration change broke something.

          If a popular distro automatically configures LVM snapshots, I’d expect more regular desktop users to be aware if it. AFAIK, none do, so it seems like something only server admins would know about.