The big names mostly can’t yet, but some lesser-known Linux distributions offer the ability to undo updates and recover from damage, even automatically.
With a new version of Linux Mint available, a lot of people – especially less-technical types – are about to upgrade their PCs. As with almost all major upgrades, inevitably some stuff won’t work with the new version. Going back is difficult, although Mint does have a solution, and so do some smaller distros.
Linux Mint includes the Timeshift utility, originally developed by Teejeetech, but that doesn’t make it invulnerable. No operating system is, as amply demonstrated recently by CrowdStrike. If installed on a file system that supports copy-on-write (COW) snapshots, Timeshift can use that, but if you chose some other disk format, it can also back up your system files using rsync to another drive.
I reverted to ext4 from Btrfs a year or so ago after discovering it was the issue behind my much longer boot times. I’ve been using Timeshift with it rsyncing to a second drive, and this has served me well, when I did once or twice have to do a restore to undo an update.
The only thing I found quite promising in the linked article, is two Linux distros that actually have dual-root-volumes which sounds most interesting (I suppose a bit like Android phones have those A and B partitions?).
See https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/linux_rollback_options/