How to rollback an "apt-get install dist-upgrade"?

In order to get up-to-date with some kernel libraries, I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu 13.10 using sudo apt-get install dist-upgrade. However, after upgrading it the results were not satisfactory at all and, as a matter of fact, I am experiencing some performance issues now and slow booting…

I browsed several forums and solutions in order to rollback my system as it was before upgrade. However I didn't find an official solution so far, such as apt-get rollback ... sort of.

The most reasonable (and smart) solution I have found it was look up at the /var/log/apt/history.log and browse the content for the latest upgrade to find the previous libraries versions and manually reinstalling each one of them (and removing the new ones prior).

There is a reasonable solution that helped me out to figure this workaround.

However, I was wondering if maybe someone has knowledge about any official tool to perform such rollback operation.

Does anyone has any ideas to rollback an upgraded system?

I would really appreciate any efforts, thanks in advance!

I think that short of having a backup before the upgrade and revert to it, it's almost impossible in general.

The upgrade can have modified config files that could possibly not work with older version... and there is normally no track of this and no automated way to go back.

When brtfs will be ready for prime time, we could have snapshots before each upgrade, but for now, your idea is the most viable one.

Although I suggest trying to see if you can find what caused a problem, and eventually file a bug report about it. Having "held" packages is a sure way to problems in the future.