Last time my Ubuntu Linux broke anything during an update is over 15 years ago. Last time a version upgrade failed was probably too over 5-10 years ago. I literally can't remember those times
Ahh until something hangs when updating grub. Had it happen twice over the last couple of months. No real biggie as it's not the hardest thing to recover from / easy enough to pull my config and rebuild.
I'll probs have to migrate back over, grub will be written to on every rebuild for what I'm assuming is adding entries. Not sure of the inner workings all I know is it's caused me headaches a couple of times now.
That's why I use Gentoo. If something breaks I just boot system from external drive and solve the issue. Or even if bootloader breaks I can use kernel from external drive, but boot into main system.
Btrfs snapshots not always work tho), i tell this story for *th time on lemmy but my fedora 38 btrfs broke completely from update to 39 and when i tried revert to 38 with help of btrfs snapshots, what came out is weird mix of 38 and 39 and when i reverted again, my whole ssd on which fedora btrfs was installed, this ssd locked completely, on hardware level, even though it was brand new, 2 weeks of usage by me, i fortunately repaired ssd myself and flashed lmde6 on it, but avoided btrfs and fedora after that
Once I went travelling and left my arch(btw) desktop computer unplugged for just over a full month.
When I came back there were 1 235 packages needing updating, between repo and AUR.
.... It worked fine tho. That install didn't really go to shit until about a month ago, when months of sloppy system management on my end finally caught up to me and left me with a lot of mysterious issues. So I cut my losses and ditched it.
Yeah, I ran Arch for years and every time the wiki or someone in irc said, "Do it X way, not Y," I always followed that instruction. Never had a single issue with system stability.
Guess that's atypical? I learned a lot, these days I mostly use Ubuntu or Debian.
Tbh, trusting pacman with everything and keeping my AUR pkg sources preserved in a source folder is literally all it took to keep the system stable. Idk, is that a lot? It felt easy.
Well, prepare for some even bigger updates. When a new libc or gcc or similar such version comes out, they like to recompile everything.
Sometimes you get 4000+ package updates, just from one day to the next.
They do that, though, because it increases compatibility, and you get automatic snapshots, too, so it's kind of less daunting than 250+ package updates on Debian et al.
I have a laptop running Linux Mint I only use for hosting bar trivia. I only need it to run like 4 applications but I need them to run flawlessly. The last time I updated it jacked up my soundboard, which I didn't notice until I was in front of a crowd and it played the wrong sound effects. Never again.
Only for version updates. Beyond that, dnf-automatic handles those invisibly in the background. I only notice them when Firefox gets an update and demands a relaunch before it lets me keep browsing.
i haven't checked for updates on one of my machines for like 7 months now. some packages are partial upgrades (hilariously, xz is currently on the backdoored version and I don't care to fix it)
the thing survived multiple 500+ package upgrades from partial upgrade state and has been running for like 2.5 years now
I update my packages every day on debian. I have yet to have something break. The only issue I ever had was steam got uninstalled when dist-upgrading from debian 11 to 12. Promptly reinstalled, of course all my games were still on disk.
But not too frequently. Updating too often on Arch will increase your chances of something breaking. Updating once a week or twice a week gives the developers some time to fix bugs and make changes to other packages as needed
I only ever update between projects - no way am I going to break something in the middle of everything.
This time, jump to new gnome means broken extensions as usual, and a hilarious one: qbittorrent doesn't show it's window in Wayland (gnome-with-X works). The soft is running, it there in the list of apps, there's even a big X "Close Window" button on Zoom Out but no actual window.
