Hello, I’ve been a long time Linux user but I had a 5 years break and I am coming back to it now.

I’ve been trying several Linux distributions in the past week, installing the packages and configuring them as I need with several different orders of success.

My last case was an Ubuntu installation that I was very happy with and pretty close to call it setup and done, until I installed virtualbox and restarted the system only to find it bricked.

Obviously I could try to drop into one of the terminals on ctrl + alt + Fx and fix it, but I wonder if I could be smarter about it and be more prepared for this kind of situation.

One of the starting points I think would be having a separate home partition from the rest of the system. I used to have it in the past and it was great.

But then what’s next? What are the best FS I could pick for each type of partition? A performant one to keep the code and package manager cache, a journaling/snapshop based one for system, another type for game data, etc etc.

What if I would like to have a snapshot of working version of my system backed up somewhere ready to restore as simple as simple as possible?

How do you configure your systems in order to quickly recover from an unexpected bricking without growing some more white hairs, and squeezing as much performance vs feature for each of your use case?

  • Eufalconimorph
    1·
    8 months ago

    I use NixOS & Home Manager. My config is in git, and I use an ephemeral setup with ZFS & tmpfs:

    Mount layout:

    /		 tmpfs  
├─/boot /dev/sda1  FAT32 EFI system partition
├─/nix	 rpool/local/nix ZFS partition
├─/home/persist rpool/safe/home ZFS partition
└─/persist	 rpool/safe/persist ZFS partition

    ZFS partitions under rpool/safe/ get backed up, the rest don’t need to be. Everything else can be rebuilt (and most of it gets re-created at boot anyway, since / and /home are tmpfs).