I have tested a lot of atomic and traditional distributions lately. Tons of desktop environments strictly for fun and branching out. Having a 1 2 3 backup strategy and not just having it in place, but being able to restore your backup in a timely manner to keep continuity is paramount. You can list infinite reasons why.
Why do atomic distros which are supposed to me more stable, superior to some degree immutable environments lack good backup options? You can hack things together and there are somewhat installable tools. Like timeshift or etc etc. But it seems they place a lot more emphasis on rolling back poor updates in the event than total system backups.
By default it you should have true backups then layer in rollbacks. Not the other way around. Am I missing something?
Okay, so let me break down what I THINK is happening here, which is that you might have a misunderstanding of what what atomic/immutable means.
First, these are made to separate OSspace from UserSpace. Whatever you keep in UserSpace is your responsibility.
Second, the actual running OS is built on layers like containers. The hash of what your OSspace is can be readily gotten to compile the exact same version of it from the repos that hold the presompiled versions of these things. Just like containers.
Third, you don’t need to backup any of the OS because of the above.
Lastly, the general idea is that since you don’t need to backup anything about the OS, and you should be able to checkout a hash of some sort that can download and be eventually bit-consistant with the OS layer, all you have to worry about is the UserSpace content.
How you manage the UserSpace content is up to you. Back your stuff up, start a bare machine and check the OS out to a specific revision where your previous machine was at, then drop your UserSpace stuff in, and it will “just work”.
What I am understanding from the atomics are that your view is right with caveats. Flatpaks only write to /home. But not all apps or software are flatpak. There is no standard for where apps write in Linux so some apps get wrote to system, some apps write to /home. Which allows creep and data scatter throughout a system.
It seems with traditional systems you gain good backups that are easy to redeploy should you need them. But config drift can creep up, updates break more easily, and rollbacks require up to date snapshots.
Atomics make rollbacks easier, but backups harder and more complex during restorations due to fragmented backup locations for different types of files. Also apps don’t always play well with say SElinux on fedora but it’s rare take Mullvad for instance its not a flatpak and they primarily update as. Deb or similar. Requiring distrobox or toolbox. Which is a whole other level of complexity.
I am basically trying to discern if I should go immutable or traditional OS install. Things sound great on paper. But daily driving is a different story.
I want security by default, sandbox/containerized apps, Wayland native, with solid backup support infrastructure. So not if but when and I do it often testing backups or re-deploying a machine. I can boot back in as close to never left as I can.
So continuity is paramount. I been eyeing fedora kiniote, fedora workstation KDE, Debian likely KDE. Only because cinnamon isn’t Wayland native yet and likely won’t be for a while.
Edit: Currently I been running NIXos. It’s been great but config only backups up system apps and not data or app state. However even under /home backups you’ll still lose system files unless their manually tracked and synced as well. It’s one giant hassle. I used to clonezilla but my search for other DEs and OSes that scratched the itch for stock Mints flaws has still evaded me.
I think you misunderstand the point of atomic still. Your base system should be installed entirely through ublue or other. Every time you update ublue will hash it and you can go back to that exact config with a working base system. Flatpaks and distrobox are user applications and should store all the data they need somewhere under your /home. Back up your /home and /etc with rsync or similar. When all is said and done your be able to recreate your system with ublue, and restore your configs and personal files with rsync.
The advantages of ublue is you can easily share or restore your base system without needing to backup gigabytes of data every update
Edit nvm you mentioned NixOS.
I’m pretty sure ublues variants of atomic have easy backup features 🤔 but yes this is one issue that needs to be addressed by a distro, not sure if it exists entirely without setting each install methods working directory manually