[michaelmrose]

I have not personally used timeshift. I have used zfsbootmenu and syncoid found it useful and fit for purpose. Personally I think its more reasonable to separate boot environments from backing up as they are two separate if related concerns. EG boot environments are for when something went wrong with an update and backups are for when your drive failed. If both went wrong you just do both operations in sequence restore from backup and THEN pick the prior boot environment and make it the default.

Insofar as timeshift consider the review source, circumstances, and nature of complaints. Users who don't have difficulties rarely post anything and yet many reviews are positive. Those that aren't seem to focus on people who didn't realize they could provide a secondary drive and just kept storing data until their OS drive filled up.

Mint leans heavily towards technically incompetent users and yet many people were able to use it successfully. Meeting every users needs no matter how incapable is probably a poor benchmark to define if somethings is "crap" or not even if those users problems are are a great guideline to a path forward to helping all users better.

For instance it might be better if timeshift only supported a fs with snapshots instead of rsync and required a secondary disk and warned of space issues long before the disk fills up but it seems quite possible to competently use it right now.