skullgiver , 11 hours ago

You can do (most) of this without rebooting by leveraging the btrfs support built into systemd-nspawn, which allows creating ephemeral data volumes to mess around in. It’s meant for containers, not the semi-Silverblue system you’ve set up, but it may save you time messing about with new tooling.

It should also be noted that although tools often miss support for it, almost any LVM2 filesystem can do snapshots if set up with enough free disk space for them.

I just use a package manager hook to set up btrfs timeshift snapshots whenever I do something to the root partition, but to each their own.