Say you are dual-booting Debian and Arch and want to upgrade Debian oldstable to Debian stable. But you want to keep the old installation available as a fall-back option. And you also want to re-use your configuration files and dot files, but in a way that incompatible changes to your dot files in the new Debian or Arch version do never break the old program versions.

How do you do that ?

(I describe my own approach in a comment below.)

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      3 days ago
      • having a second system that boots can be very handy if something breaks - for example one can chroot intp the other system and fix a missing grub install
      • when disk space becomes scarce, one csn mount it where it makes sense
      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 days ago

        No:

        1. Every single modern distro keeps multiple known-good previously running copies of the system to boot back into
        2. The disk space argument is just insane. Having TWO versions of an OS takes TWICE as much space as having one. I don’t even get what you mean. You can mount a disk anywhere at any time
        3. No part of any installed Linux distro can get into a state where it cannot be accessed, unless you encrypt or delete your entire disk without thinking
        4. BTRFS or ZFS can shift back time or keep snapshots, so none of your reasoning is needed at all. Same with immutable distros.