I’m not entirely sure, but I feel like you know something about nondestructive editing in Krita! Can I ask you some questions about it?

Is it possible to use the smart patch tool in a nondestructive manner? I’d like it to take samples from the underlying layer(s), but apply the result to the upper (empty) layer. Just like the clone brush can do. Is it possible to do it in this way?

Hold on, I know how to make it really infuriating!

But out of curiosity… What exactly it looks like?

the OS provides simply the base software interface to your hardware, and does so in a separate layer, while your own software and data are another segment you don’t want to mix with the OS.

My own software? Sounds like a bunch of containers on top of a base system.

So, using an immutable system, one could achieve… having one less backup target, apparently? Which is good, but seemingly not good enough for this particular case. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ As far as I understand, it could certainly save the day if I mess up its settings, but in case of FS corruption it effectively just adds a different kind of procedure that I’ll have to execute for its full restoration? And splitting my system and data to a different partitions… well, this approach in itself have nothing to do with immutability, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I managed to recreate exactly the same system with all my data and stuff, down to ctimes, mtimes, hardlinks and reflinks, as if nothing happened at all. Just saying!

How do you know it was btrfs, are you living in my walls?!

Well, jokes aside, it was a power outage. In my defense, I’ve survived dozens of power outages while using btrfs with almost no negative consequences!

I mean, it sounds both tempting and terrifying at the same time, but even assuming it’s a good idea, how to reproduce my data, then? Not just the data per se, but all these volatile stuff in /var and $XDG_{CONFIG,DATA,STATE}_HOME as well. I like the idea of being able to (re)produce the entire system from a tiny “seed”, but my system is still not the same without those parts, as it will behave slightly differently. So I still have to backup all my data, haven’t I?

Also, using different partitions might be less fragile, but also much less convenient in terms of free space management, especially when you only have a single medium-sized SSD. So I just use a single rootfs (with subvolumes instead of partitions) for the system and all kind of data.