[johnramsden]

It's a cool idea but I almost wonder if they would have gotten more functionality and the same end result by making use of ZFS snapshots and boot environments. Configuration could have even been kept in ZFS properties. Ikey has previous talked about ZFS not being right for a desktop distribution but I don't agree. Snapshots, rollbacks and checksums benefit everyone everywhere. It could be used transparently in the background so the users of Solus wouldn't even need to know it was being used if they didn't want to. That said, if ZFS can't be used, I can see 'clr-boot-manager' being useful, and I like the fact that Ikey works on projects that can be used outside of just Solus. I've been using Solus on one of my laptops and following along with its development and it's quite interesting project. They seem to be happy to try new things and do things in a different way if it seems like it will benefit the users, but they seem to still be content to use existing software if it looks like it will do what they are looking for.

[szemet]

I've not used it, but afaik Suse linux default install have btrfs+snapper (http://snapper.io) It snapshots before every install and yast configuraton step and have a boot to snapshot feature..

[johnramsden]

I used snapper on Arch Linux before I eventually moved to ZFS, it worked quite well. Now I'm happier with ZFS and zfs-auto-snapshot though to be honest.

[aruggirello]

Great tool - it's also available for the most common distros (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu...) and it supports LVM, EXT4...

[johnramsden]

Cool, I didn't realize it supported more than btrfs.

[sargun]

ZFS is pain if you aren't actively aware of it, and tuning it. With heterogenous workloads and containers on Linux, it fails in interesting ways. A lot of this is due to the SPL, and the opaque model of memory management it maintains.

[johnramsden]

I don't know if I'd agree. It can be a bit of a pain to set up and get right if you've never done it before and if you don't know what you're doing, but with Solus they pride themselves on managing the whole stack and I'm sure they could easily figure it out. Also, i'm not sure what kind of workloads you're describing that it fails in - i've used ZFS on everything from servers, and big desktops to small laptops, and even mini sd cards on tablets. It hasn't once let me down and has multiple times found corruption that I would never have found had it not been for ZFS. I think most people do not realize how often corruption actually happens because they have no way of finding out about it.