this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I don't think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It's an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I'm back to good ol' Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created
preandpostsnapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.Nice use case for snapshots! :-) I'll put it in my backlog, perhaps it is a nice insurance for my crash prone machines.
Please tell me more about Spiral Linux. I'm not a huge Debian fan personally(at least for desktop), but I often install Linux on other people's machines. And Mint/ Debian is great for them.
How does it differ from stock?
Details on the Spiral Linux web site: https://spirallinux.github.io/
Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I've personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven't done side-by-side comparisons, so I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637@lemmy.ca , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: https://lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there's a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
Well for one thing their driver support is apparently "harrowing". 😊
I will never understand why people choose distributions that will brick themselves when the wind blows, so they add snapshot support as a band-aid, and then they celebrate "woo hoo, it takes pre and post snapshots after every package install!"
How about using a distro where you never have to restore a snapshot...
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn't play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn't set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I'm not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it's no big deal.
And my point is that it's not normal to fear updates. Any updates, but especially updates to essential packages like the kernel or graphics driver.
If you're using the experimental branch of a distro or experimental versions of packages on purpose then snapshots are a good tool. But if you're using a normal distro and its normal packages you should not have to resort to such measures.
Nvidia just sucks across every distro I've used. Have you had good experience running CUDA, cuDNN, and cuBLAS? If so, which distro?
And have you run it alongside other things that require kernel modules, like ZFS and VirtualBox?