This is what openSUSE Tumbleweed is designed to do, although config files in /home require manual setup to include. It allows you to completely rollback if necessary after a system upgrade, allowing you to use a bleeding edge distro without fear of having an unusuable system. If an upgrade goes bad, usual procedure is to roll back to the last btrfs snapshot and just wait for the fix (which usually comes in a couple days to a week, as Tumbleweed advances rather quickly).

openSUSE has a specific btrfs subvolume setup and grub/systemd-boot integration to enable this, which is not too common even today, so it really is a bit special in that you can have this functionality without excessive time spent setting it up manually.

The snapshot approach works, but there is a trap nobody mentions: most people set up btrfs after the system is already installed, so the first快照 only captures whatever state they reached after those multiple failed attempts. The real win is snapshotting before you touch anything at all, ideally right after a fresh install when things actually work. Rolling back to a known-good state beats googling the same error message for the third time.

Yes. Snapshot…make your changes… Try the system…and if it is messed use the old snapshot.

If you try tumbleweed the snapshots are also integrated to the grub menu so you can boot to any snapshot, and if you like the one you booted to you issue sudo snapper rollback and that makes your current snapshot the default.

It also has auto snapshots anytime you use the GUI yast tools, or other CLI tools like zypper, so you don’t have to manually created snapshots. Also has cleanup schedule to remove old snaphots either by date or number of snapshots

Usually, under btrfs filesystems containing system data you can get snapshots and rollback flawlessly, but some subfilesystems do not get those snapshots by default, like /var/log or /home, so you may need to set them up in order to enable snapshots, and manually create one when you start tinkering with your system. You then can revert the full snapshot, or even individual files

If you keep within the file system (e.g. don’t format anything or write to the device itself), are capable of executing a few commands in a terminal, and know how to boot from a live linux in case something goes wrong, you should be fine using snapshots, I’d say

Yes, it does. i recently installed a bunch on crap and decided I don’t need any of it, so I just rolled back to the snapshot I created manually, before starting the process and my system was simply restored.

Just keep one thing in mind, rolling back automatically makes the filesystem read only so You need to remount.

While this doesn’t answer your question, I use Docker for this exact purpose, since you can throw away everything if it fails, whilst keeping a recipe for success documented in a Dockerfile.