If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again. So, no, it’s only productive if you are in a fucked-up environment where changes bring more breakage than they fix.
It’s useful if you don’t plan to do the same thing again, though. So if you are just trying random stuff, yeah, go ahead.
If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again
Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).
For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.
Try Root on ZFS.
If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.
Good advice!
This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.
This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.
I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(
