this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I think you already got a good answer but let me throw in another:
Fedora's dnf provides some good history and update reversion tools. You can use:
dnf history list
to get a list of all actions taken on the system since install. Use "dnf history info 5" to get info on the 5th transaction. (Get the transaction ID numbers from "dnf history list".)
Then to revert a change use either:
dnf history rollback or dnf history undo
Using undo reverses a single transaction, so if you have one where you did something like "dnf install tmux" and then ran undo on it then that would be equivalent to running "dnf remove tmux" in terms of what it does on your system.
Rollback does what you might think: it basically goes through all the updates between the most recent and the one specified and it reverses each of them, theoretically restoring the system to the state it was in at that time.
I say "theoretically" because this isn't a perfect system. For example, if you have an update where you removed some software that had some customizations done to it and then went through a rollback it'll put that software back but may be missing configurations you applied to it, so potentially it could cause some issues if those were important. This gets into a lot of complicated stuff and tbh it is a powerful but imperfect system. Something like Atomic gives you more of a guarantee that a rollback will work because the whole system state is defined by the installer, not just the packages.
There's one more note: Fedora removes old versions of packages from its repos so you'll need to add their historical archives repo to do certain things. I forget how to do that off the top of my head.
This may not be what you want exactly but it's a powerful tool that's good to be aware of.
See this for more info.
Thank you for that insight. I didn't end up using this but as you said, this is very powerful and I'm glad I know it exists!