I was sick of reinstalling after every experiment, so I built a desktop that survives distro hopping, dumb package upgrades and the occasional X11/Wayland meltdown. The trick is simple: encrypted LUKS root, Btrfs subvolumes with aggressive zstd compression and snapshotting, plus borg backups mirrored offsite with rclone. I can break everything and be back to a working system in 10 minutes.

Quick recipe you can follow (NVMe primary, small EFI, LUKS encrypted root):

  • Partition: EFI 512M, root as LUKS. Cryptsetup and create Btrfs inside the LUKS container: cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2; cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot; mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/mapper/cryptroot
  • Create subvolumes: mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home; umount /mnt
  • Mount for install: mount -o subvol=@,noatime,compress=zstd:15,space_cache=v2,ssd /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; mkdir -p /mnt/home; mount -o subvol=@home,compress=zstd:15 /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home
  • Install your distro onto /mnt normally, put /boot or EFI on the unencrypted partition if your distro needs it.

Make snapshots and backups part of the routine:

  • Local snapshots: use Timeshift (GUI) or snapper for automatic pre/post package snapshots. Snapper is great for root snapshots on Btrfs.
  • Offsite backups: borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 /path/to/repo; borg create --stats /path/to/repo::‘{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M}’ /home /etc; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. Mirror the borg repo to cloud with rclone or an inexpensive S3/backblaze bucket.

How to recover when you inevitably mess up:

  1. Boot a live USB, open the LUKS container with cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot.
  2. Mount the Btrfs and list snapshots: btrfs subvolume list -s /mnt.
  3. Make the snapshot the default root with btrfs subvolume set-default <id> /mnt and reboot.

Hardware notes: buy a second NVMe or a small external SSD for local borg archives and cold snapshots. Avoid weird consumer RAID features on laptops and get a wifi card known to have mainline driver support. This setup saved my butt more than once when a kernel update nuked my X11 config or when I wanted to try a new distro without grief.

If you want, I can post a ready-to-run install script for Ubuntu/Arch with these exact commands and a sample snapper config. Stop treating your root filesystem like a fragile snowflake and start building resilience.

  • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
    0·
    24 days ago

    Two things

    • first off it seems super neat but I understand none of it
    • I’m worried by the fact people with your expertise still fuck up their system

    So I’m not the target audience (for lack of know-how), but at the same time I wish I were so I could gain some peace of mind when using my new Linux install (mostly for work, I probably won’t tinker too much with this one)

    • Engywook@lemmy.zip
      0·
      24 days ago

      Last time I tried BTRFS immy laptop became sluggish AF. I just keep important files backed up and use ext4 everywhere. In case of a disaster it takes 15 minutes to reinstall Arch anyway.

    • NightFantom@slrpnk.net
      0·
      24 days ago

      For me the biggest leap was letting go of my local settings. My kubuntu has about everything I want out of the box, then I install zsh with omz and I’m pretty much done.

      So whenever I break something it’s an easy fresh install.

      My data (steam games, code) is in a separate drive, and especially with cloud saves / git everything is available even if I were to break that drive (would just suck to remember which things I need to redownload from where).

      So that helped me release my tinkering spirit as much as I wanted, and while I’m far from a Linux guru, I’ve definitely learned a lot from that.

      Edit: not to say that I don’t try to fix things, just knowing that I can easily restart is the main thing.