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by pimeys 2008 days ago
It has been much better for the past 5+ years, but what I did with my workstation is I installed Arch into a btrfs file system. Now when I `pacman` whatever, it'll create a snapshot first and then run the updates. If anything breaks, I go to the grub menu, boot into the previous snapshot and rollback into that state.

Never needed it yet, but it's good to have. I remember the problems in the past...

You can also do it with zfs, but I wanted to not have the filesystem as DKMS.

1 comments

I do exactly the same thing. Snapper is amazing. I've used it once, but only because it was a bit more convenient than downgrading the one app that got messed up.

I also used it recently when I tried to get the new Assassin's Creed to run. I knew it was a bit of a crap shoot, so I took a snapshot before I started compiling and installing the Git versions of graphics and translations libraries. After a couple hours I realized it wasn't going to work and just rolled my root directory back to before I started throwing packages all over my system. It was very satisfying. :D