Saved me for the second time in 6 months, holy shit.
Flatpak problems seem to keep happening on my machine, and this time I just couldn't do anything with flatpak at all. Apps wouldn't launch, terminal commands wouldn't work. No browser, communications, email, nothing since everything is now on flathub.
Thankfully I had backups set up. One is timeshift, which incrementally saves my system and boot files, and the other is the distro's own Backup tool, which is a bit slow but saves my entire home directory every few days.
I was able to restore the missing files from the backup, and everything works again. I'm now going through the issue to figure out how exactly it happened.
Last time flatpak decided to just delete its own PGP keys so it couldn't communicate with itself anymore. A timeshift backup fixed that - I have since set up hourly backups over 24 hours, since they're incremental they don't take up a lot of space and they delete the older ones automatically. Default home backup app takes a bit more space, I'm going to look at replacing it with something a bit leaner and faster if possible.
Still took a bit of time, but we're talking maybe 15 minutes instead of a potential multi-day or even week-long headache.
But if you're switching to linux, do yourself a favor and get a spare 1TB drive that you will use exclusively for backups. It's not optional, this will literally save you.
If you want to do cool shit you can even set up a NAS in your basement and backup on there, otherwise honestly even just an external drive you plug in is enough, as long as you remember to do at least daily backups.
Lol, backups are necessary regardless of your OS unless you don't value any of your data at all, which tbh, anyone who says that is lying and/or stupid.
I used to use Timeshift, but have even had that screwup an install once on which I had to perform a complete reinstall. Now I just
rsyncalmost everything once a month, including/usrand other root directories.Ideal backup solution for home use is a
cronjob set torsyncbackups to an external RAID NAS both on premises and off premises, as well as an external hard drive you can stash in a backpack should your place catch on fire. Rule of 3s.As an aside, I gave up on Flatpak. It's a good idea, but has just as many issues as your various package managers if not worse as it can cause conflicting library redundancies in my experience.