Run updates without me having to worry that “whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory.”
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it’s not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that’s not exactly how Windows recovery works.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to “just reinstall” beyond laughable.
I have an uncle who will assume anything that takes over 20 minutes has crashed so managed to break his Windows box by continually hard resetting as it was trying to apply a large upgrade.
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
Run updates without me having to worry that “whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory.”
Just to provide another data point: I’ve had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you’re left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
sfc /scannow didn’t work? Well too bad, cuz now you gotta reinstall your OS
… No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it’s not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that’s not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to “just reinstall” beyond laughable.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases
I have an uncle who will assume anything that takes over 20 minutes has crashed so managed to break his Windows box by continually hard resetting as it was trying to apply a large upgrade.
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
That’s why I make a btrfs snapshot of my system before every upgrade. Rolling back from a rescue image takes only a minute.
Edit: automatically via the upgrade script
What a great idea! They should automate something like that! Maybe they could call it System Restore?
I never claimed to have invented the technique.