So after I last updated my deck I got a generic error message. No biggie. But then suddenly on the next reboot: stuck at the boot logo. Tried lots of things, no way of getting back in. Not with the current kernel, not with the previous one. Really annoying as I use my deck as a general purpose computer too.
So I created a recovery USB. Reinstalling the OS (which attempts to preserve user data and games) failed silently. So I reluctantly copied my entire home folder to an external drive and went with the nuclear option of completely reimaging the internal drive. After steam os finished installation I restored my entire home folder from the backup and restarted the machine.
I was expecting to having to manually reinstall and reconfigure so many apps and settings. And was verily not looking forward to it. But lo and behold: pretty much everything worked just the way it did before the fumbled system update. My desktop layout and window arrangements remained the same, settings and preferences were preserved, it didn’t even log me out of email account. No manual imports of settings required. I had to reinstall most apps via the Discover store first, that much is true. But that took just a couple of minutes.
So yeah, really happy with how that went. Last time I had to reinstall everything on a Windows system it was a major pain as settings are all over the place (on the system drive, in the registry, inside appdata, inside the my documents folder, etc). I guess it has to do with the Linux philosophy of “everything is a file”.
In the future I’ll actually move my /home/ folder to my SSD card so that if this ever happens again the process is even less painful.
PSA: when you backup your home folder make sure to include all the hidden folders and files (anything starting with a dot like the .config folder).
It’s a good practice to have the home folder on a separate partition, so it doesn’t get overwritten on a reinstall
You don’t even need that. I have switched between several distros and always kept the same filesystem and just deleted everything but the
/homefolder. No problems. Every installer supported that.Partitioning in Linux is something I just don’t get, especially in combination with encryption. Every guide says something different about what partitions you need, what names and filesystems you should go with, etc. or are outdated and not accurate to the actual installation & partition managers. And on top of that I just never know how much space I should reserve for the system & home partitions either.
The problem is this isn’t the same for every distro and sometimes different versions of the same distro. Also sometimes you have multiple options to do the same thing. There isn’t really a definitive answer, so one would need to know your situation to answer this