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?

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    I’ve never tried an immutable OS, but I’d love if the ability to do system backups and redeploy to another computer was just part of any OS.

    Especially when Linux encourages you to distro hopp.

    Clonezilla is great but it already happened to me that one backup wasn’t deployable on another (really old) computer

    • Leaflet@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      That kinda exists with NixOS, but you’d have to backup your personal files separately.

      You’re not really backing up the OS with NixOS, but the nix configuration file describes how the OS is built in a reproducible way.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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        19 hours ago

        Yes I heard about it but apparently NixOS is quite complex and not accessible to someone like me who considers himself as an eternal Linux newbie.

        • Leaflet@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          Yeah. I’ve used NixOS and think the idea is cool, but overall I prefer Fedora Atomic. Unlike NixOS, it’s a complete OS out of the box and is less quirky than NixOS. Though I am a proponent of Flatpak, those who don’t like it will have a very different opinion of Fedora Atomic.

          I just wish Fedora Atomic was more declarative and that bootc could work a bit closer to how NixOS’s nix.conf worked. I would love if that there was a a container file could be declared and used built similarly to nix.conf is (avoiding the user manually building the and signing the container file).