[dizhn]

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has this. The installer defaults to btrfs and snapshots using snapper. Snapshots are automatic before and after every package manager operation. Save for something that breaks grub, you can always recover.

[bravetraveler]

In that spirit, if you have an EFI system, you don't need GRUB

[boomboomsubban]

You sort of do if you want to boot kernels on btrfs. Refind is an option, but not most of the other EFI bootloaders.

[bravetraveler]

Ah, good point - I neglected the BTRFS involvement/need to find kernels... that one would ideally include with these snapshots, of course

[account42]

You put the kernel (built with efistub) directly onto the EFI partition - no boot loaded needed at all.

[boomboomsubban]

Which kind of ruins bootable snapshots, as your kernel isn't part of them. You could have a massive esp with ~10 unified kernels each pointing at a different snapshot, with some kind of management script to handle them, but using GRUB seems easier than that.

[Pesthuf]

I think there's still value in a bootloader. You can easily load an old kernel with an old initramfs if you messed up somehow, or adjust kernel parameters.

The boot UI for most modern UEFI-Firmwares is really primitive and they usually don't come with EFI shells.

[dizhn]

Can you point to read-only snapshots that way?