Linux Mint Recovery Partition & Cloud Recovery

[SpeeQz1]

Recovery Partition

Recently stumbled upon the fact that Pop!_OS comes with a recovery partition (https://system76.com/support/pop-recovery/) which is an entirely separate installation on the system and is an identical copy of the installation .iso used for installing Pop!_OS, it also has the option to reinstall the system without wiping out user home files.

With that discovery an idea I want to propose is for Linux Mint to come with its own recovery partition, this has a couple of benefits in that users won't need to have their own USB stick with Mint on it for repairing (e.g. timeshifting a system from a separate boot), it will also make swap partition management much more easier because it requires the user boot from a separate operating system to edit and resize the partitions (https://mintwiki.org/wiki/RAM_Management#Swap_Partition).

Additionally this will help with troubleshooting any issues that happen on users systems because it is not a rare occurrence when looking at the support threads in forum posts or social media like Discord.

Of course this doesn't mean that Linux Mint has to have this be the default for everyone, it can be an option checked by default asking the user during installation whether they want to setup a recovery partition.

Additionally if the bootloader fails, on UEFI systems you can boot into the recovery partition so there is that advantage too.

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Cloud Recovery

On a separate topic, Windows recently added the option to reinstall the system from the cloud (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/cloud-rebuild/), which now makes it where both MacOS and Windows have that option. This has the benefit of making it so that the user does not need to use a bootable USB drive to reinstall their system from scratch if they want to.

Adding this to Linux Mint would be a nice feature although it would prob be best to have the option to change the cloud server location so that users can setup their own cloud server recovery instead of having to rely on only Linux Mint mirrors.

[Arzumify]

This sounds interesting.

A recovery partition is relatively simple assuming we just hook into grub to allow it to boot. Should we have it as it's own entirely separate immutable partition, or more like a self-extracting disk-image?
Additionally, if btrfs is enabled, could we also make the recovery partition an overlay over the original snapshot, to avoid having to duplicate system files?

In terms of cloud recovery, how do you propose this to work? Restoring a complete mint snapshot, or just re-installing all the packages via apt (may not necessarily fix things)? MacOS works by literally downloading the installer and then booting into it (at the EFI layer), which isn't possible since our WiFi drivers are loaded by the kernel.

[SpeeQz1]

A separate partition would probably best as it will ensure that it's isolated as much as possible.

As for the cloud recovery I am not sure how to implement, with hopefully this discussion post bringing people who can give an idea as to how to approach this technically wise.