[kwlug-disc] Why I switched to Mint

[William Park]

On 2022-06-12 07:31, Doug Moen wrote:
> The problems with OpenSUSE/Plasma mounted until I gave up and installed Mint/Cinnamon. Much better.

OK, I just tried Mint.  It looks like polished Ubuntu, but old.  It has 
the same softwares that Ubuntu has, so doesn't look more appealing than 
Ubuntu itself.

> Fearless upgrades with system snapshots and rollback. OpenSUSE does this best, with snapper, which is preinstalled and preconfigured. Mint has timeshift preinstalled (Mint is now the maintainer of timeshift). It's not preconfigured, but the Welcome app guides you through the configuration, post installation. Timeshift is not as elegant as snapper, but it's probably good enough. Fedora has timeshift and snapper in their repos, but they are complex to install and configure. Timeshift broke in Fedora 35 so you have to install from the github repo for now. The procedure for installing snapper has also changed significantly across recent Fedora releases. If your snapshot and rollback software breaks when you upgrade Fedora, then you do not have "fearless upgrades". This feature needs to be built in and supported by the distro. Yes, you can use BTRFS commands to take snapshots before upgrades, but you still need to ensure that your filesystem is partitioned correctly, so that /home and /var are not included in system snapshots (for example). So this is an expert level approach, and I just want a simple "undo" command.

I looked at Timeshift.  It does "rsysc" and "btrfs" method.  For rsysc 
method, it does full copy at first, then incremental with hard links. 
With btrfs method, it does snapshots which means you need btrfs 
partition to begin with.  It only supports "Ubuntu style".  I don't know 
what that means, because ext4 is the default in Ubuntu.

Anyways, Fedora is better in this, at least for manually (which is what 
I do on Slackware anyways).  The default is btrfs, and it sets up /root 
and /home subvolumes.  You can take snapshot while running.  Replace it 
with old snapshots and reboot, and you're back to old.

But, Fedora has other problems.  It's off my list.