I have tried it on several distros before and it always causes problems because you get a million more packages intermingled with your already installed packages and sometimes you get conflicts or whatever. But it usually messes up my system. is there a safe way to have several desktops installed? or do you pretty much install a new one then remove the old one? thanks

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    4·
    1 year ago

    That’s why I use Timeshift, snapshots only take a second to make and (if you set up the script right) will be made automatically whenever apt is called. It’ll probably be a lot slower on non-BTRFS systems (hard links instead of snapshots) but it’s still a lot faster than basic copying.

    • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Oh thats neat. I’m assuming that can be configured for other package managers when you’re calling the apt equivalent?

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        2·
        1 year ago

        Any package manager with pre install hooks should work. I know someone has written the necessary hooks for pacman, if Timeshift is in your distro’s package standard package manager I bet there’s a hook pre-written for you as well.

        If there isn’t, Timeshift can also take daily/weekly/monthly/per-boot snapshots (with an optional limit for each separate type to keep). Because snapshots only track the differences, and /home is excluded by default, snapshots are generally smaller than a gigabyte or so because they only track OS updates and such. Older snapshots will grow in size as the difference between them and the current system state grows, but 9 months and an upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 to 22.10 only took up 54GB on a 1TB disk.

        I like the “take a snapshot each boot” option because you can revert every boot rather than specific actions, especially when your package manager lacks the necessary hooks.