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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

FLAVOUR: All

HEADLINE: Convenient snapshot & rollback by default

DESCRIPTION: Possibly implemented as snapper + lvm thin provisioning or btrfs. Other distros already have this, but it is far from user friendly.

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Just curious, what is missing from the implementations in the other distros you tried? I switched from Ubuntu to openSUSE last year and so far that's the only distribution where i've used snapper + lvm. I think having an implementation like theirs is pretty user friendly (just a personal opinion) or at least a good start. It gives an option to use snapper + btrfs at install time + option to boot into a read only snapshot from grub at boot time.

I haven't used SUSE, but I've used snapper with lvm thin provisioning on RHEL. It works, but it still needs manual fiddling with config files. There are a couple of other issues with lvm thin on its own. The metadata size isn't chosen well by default from what I remember. It can easily get full. There is also manual trimming required on deletes (can be done in a cron job). lvm-raid isn't directly offered with thin provisioning in Anaconda. It would still do mdadm, and run lvm-thin on top of it. Overall, the experience is not great.

I suppose I never had to do that because openSUSE handled the configuration for me. But I see your point. The experience can definitely be improved by the distributions. I had never used snapshots before moving to SUSE and now that I've actually used snapper to rollback a couple of times I don't think I'd want to have a linux install without that feature.

That's my no. 1 request too. Just two days ago I had to reinstall and waste a day because an update messed up my system.

My solution for now is to have TimeShift[0] make regular backups of system files.

[0] https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

ZFS is the drop-in FS for /root to allow this. (btrfs et al are not production ready).

lvm thin provisioning lets you achieve this with any file system. So it doesn't have to be zfs or btrfs. It can be xfs or ext4 too.

It would make sense as soon as the default filesystem becomes btrfs or ZFS. As it is now, it would need to be a feature that only appears if it finds that you have the proper filesystem.

Not necessary. Look at lvm-thin + snapper.

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