I got fed up with spending weekends redoing themes, fixing package breakage, and hunting lost dotfiles whenever I swapped laptops. If you care about uptime and reproducibility more than distro-faith, stop treating your desktop like an altar and treat it like infrastructure: encrypt the disk, snapshot the root, manage dotfiles as code, and back up everything that matters. Do that and a dead SSD or a new laptop becomes a 30-minute restore, not a week-long grief spiral.

Do this in order: 1) Install with LUKS full-disk encryption and Btrfs subvolumes for @ and @home so snaps are atomic. 2) Enable automatic snapshots with Timeshift or snapper. 3) Export your package lists: Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt; Arch: pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt; also flatpak list --app > flatpaks.txt. 4) Put your dotfiles under version control and manage them with chezmoi or GNU Stow. 5) Use Flatpak for GUI apps, containerized toolchains (podman) for dev environments, and keep only system-critical packages in the distro manager. 6) Back up with Borg: borg init --encryption=repokey /path/to/repo ; borg create repo::$(date +%F) /home /etc --stats ; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. 7) Keep a small, bootable USB with the exact kernel/tools you use so you can unlock LUKS and mount Btrfs snapshots. 8) Test restores quarterly: restore a snapshot to a spare partition and boot it. Do that for a year and tell me reinstalling is fun again.

Yes, it takes a few hours up front, but imagine swapping a motherboard or recovering from ransomware and having a known-good snapshot plus a package list and borg repo waiting. Stops the doomscrolling and gets you back to actually using Linux.

OC by @[email protected]