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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-stuff dept.

gHacks reports

The Linux Mint team has released Linux Mint 19 final, codename Tara, in [editions using] the desktop [environments] Cinnamon, Mate, [or] Xfce.

Linux Mint users who run Linux Mint 18.3 or a beta version of Linux Mint 19 will be able to upgrade to the new [release] directly. Those who don't need to upgrade to Mint 18.3 first or install the new version of Linux Mint manually instead.

[...] One of the big new features of Linux Mint 19 is Timeshift. It is part of all [three editions of Mint 19]. Timeshift creates snapshots of the system so that users may restore a previous version of the system using the functionality.

Thanks to Timeshift, you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it's as if the problem never happened.

It works similarly to [MSFT] Windows' System Restore feature.

Along with support for Timeshift comes a change in the Update Manager. The Linux Mint 19 update manager suggests [that you] install all updates in the new [release] of the operating system instead of a selection of updates.

The main idea behind the change is that users and admins may restore a previous system snapshot using Timeshift if the installation of updates causes issues. It is still possible, however, to deselect updates so that they are not installed.

Linux Mint 19 comes with one additional update-related [change]. Any user may enable automatic updates in the update preferences now. [In the past,] Linux Mint did not offer a switch to turn on automatic updates [...] because it required advanced knowledge of the distribution to restore broken systems.

English isn't Martin Brinkmann's first language and he's still becoming familiar with Linux and Mint and their terminologies.

To avoid some confusion, note that comments from their Mint 19 Beta article, earlier in June, have been folded into their new article.

In the comments there, AnorKnee Merce notes

[A} Timeshift [snapshot] will take up about 6GB of disk space in the Root or / partition. If this partition is [smaller than] 20GB, [an] "out of disk space" condition will likely occur = a borked system

Additionally, Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is, in turn, based on Debian. All of those use systemd as "an init".


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  • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:24AM (4 children)

    by Subsentient (1111) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:24AM (#701843) Homepage Journal

    That kind of functionality is not exclusive to Linux Mint, or any distro.

    btrfs subvol snap -r / /root/snapshots/whatever

    Of course, I suppose that doesn't protect the bootloader, but a borked bootloader is easy enough to fix.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by CoolHand on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:38AM (3 children)

    by CoolHand (438) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:38AM (#701844) Journal
    Its great that you can already do "timeshift", but this is designed for the non-nerd user to be better able to recover their system. Its target audience isn't hard-core nerds. Mint has traditionally been one of the "user-friendly" desktop distros, so a nice GUI that is baked-in with this timeshift ability is great, IMO. When I used PC-BSD, I really appreciated the similar way they had zfs snapshots baked into the system.
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    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:08PM (1 child)

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:08PM (#701875)

      zfs has saved the day many times!!

      I'm careful, but we all have bad days...:-/

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:07PM (#702525)

        I used to use the reiser system but then my wife mysteriously died

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @05:16PM (#702037)

      Its great that you can already do "timeshift", but this is designed for the non-nerd user to be better able to recover their system.

      Reminds me of something...

      I have a few qualms with this app:

      1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

      [...]

        -- Dropbox announcement post on HN [ycombinator.com]