Background:
Typically when I’m trying something new on Linux, I search for an online guide that doesn’t assume I’m already an expert and looks like it should be easy enough for a pleb like myself to follow. Whatever it is I’m trying to do, it usually takes me multiple tries to get it right. Sometimes, when I’m venturing into new territory, I’ll derp around in a VM so I can take snapshots and then revert to the last good snapshot when something inevitably goes wrong. This approach works well for me most of the time.
But every now and then, I don’t want to use a VM, I want to use a spare laptop that I have lying around, “bare metal” if you will. It just feels more… authentic? My hesitation w/ practicing on spare laptops is that when I mess it up, the only way I know how to start over with a clean slate is to reinstall the OS and try again. This approach is not ideal b/c I mess up a lot - this is a fact of my life - and reinstalling the OS after every mistake takes a lot of time, to the point that I just stop persuing whatever project I was working on.
Question:
Is this a good use case for btrfs? How easy is it for a pleb like myself to take snapshots and then roll back to the previous state after jacking up a config file in /home or /etc or something?
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.
Regarding the specific btrfs subvolume setup and grub/systemd-boot integration, are you talking about how some distros show the btrfs snapshots on the boot menu? Or something else?
Take a look here, it explains more about the specific configuration, such as which subvolumes are automatically snapshotted and include in rollbacks, bootloader integration, etc https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/snapper/
Basically there are many details in the setup of btrfs that are needed to get to that level where you can be confident of being able to easily rollback to a previous state. After losing some data on a manually configured btrfs setup on Fedora I went to openSUSE specifically because they have already done all the hard work for you on the btrfs config
Funny enough I went to Fedora because it did all the pre-configuration to setup disk encryption unlike all of the Debian based distros I tried; not even Ubuntu had it.
CachyOS does the same