Well, first of all, snapshots are not backups and should not be relied upon as such. They don’t protect you from a gamut of risks such as filesystem corruption, hardware failures, etc.

As far as backups, basically you can take your pick. Personally I use Duplicacy to back up my workstations to my file/media server, then from there my most critical data is backed up off site to secured cloud storage.

Timeshift is another popular tool.

There are many options out there.

Of course you can. My point is, it’s a ridiculous decision on OpenSUSE’s part to ship it this way in the first place.

Like sudo requiring you to use the root password?

Isn’t one of the principal reasons sudo exists is so you DONT need to know or use the root password to perform root-level tasks?

It’s an idiotic choice on OpenSUSE’s part IMO.

Yep, XFS is pretty much universally supported and in fact even the default filesystem for Fedora Server and RHEL. No snapshots, unfortunately. XFS’s “claim to fame” is scalability, performance, and stability.

I’ve not seen this particular issue, but BTRFS is a turd on NVME. It does about 2/3 to 1/2 the IOPS of EXT4 or XFS on several PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 drives I’ve tested on several modern AMD and Intel systems. XFS actually has the upper-hand on NVME performance over EXT4, but not by much.

FYI Arch offers linux-lts. You can install that and linux-lts-headers and switch grub/whatever your boot loader is to default to that and forget about running the bleeding edge kernel. Linux 6.4.x has been literal dog shit with several ugly amdgpu bugs and suspend is randomly borked about 1/3 of the times I try to suspend my PC for the evening (and issue I’m not experiencing alone).

So, yeah. Give the linux-lts linux-lts-headers packages a try. You get the benefits Arch’s cutting-edge packages on a stable kernel.