Welcome to this edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE’s next-generation operating system.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2026/08/31/this-month-in-kde-linux-august-2026/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2026/08/31/this-month-in-kde-linux-august-2026/
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btrfs are also very useful in case of a buggy update. immediately you go back to the previous version of the system.
Another case, i experimented. If i understand well, with btrfs when you update the system with discover or something else, Discover, instead of replacing the files, creates some sort of snapshot of the new system. This snapshot is applied when you restart the OS.
That’s a useful thing to do on mutable distros, where updating system packages writes into system directories, especially /usr, and snapshots provide a way of rolling it back. I think distros vary in how they support this and whether it’s integrated into Discover.
However, we actually don’t do this on KDE Linux, because the core system is basically a disk image. When you update that in Discover, a new image is downloaded, and the last few versions of the image are retained. Because we retain those image versions, we don’t use BTRFS snapshots of the core system - we focus on snapshotting the user’s data in their home directory, so that can be rolled back as needed.
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I forgot to say I use openSUSE which uses btrfs by default.
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First, Hadi Chokr transformed users’ home folders into Btrfs sub-volumes and turned on automatic Btrfs snapshots for all user files. Then, Bharadwaj Raju integrated the new kio-snapshot system he’s been working on and added support in Dolphin. Now you can easily view and roll back to older versions of your files
I absolutely love this addition to the OS! Plus, I used the new KDE Linux documentation to test the snapper command line. Absolutely stellar, thank you all! 
Is there a settings switch to disable the automatic snapshots? I do my own snapshots.
Not in the GUI, but you can do it in a one-liner in the terminal -
systemctl disable --now snapper-timeline.timer
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