And yet I’ve never had an apt upgrade break my whole system.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Yeah, maybe I'm just not smart enough but I always have the best luck with Debian/Ubuntu style distros. I'm glad Arch users are happy with Arch, it just doesn't work for me
sudo dpkg --configure -a
my beloved
Define 'Break'... /j
Unable to boot after the update. That’s happened to me multiple times with pacman, so I eventually switched to Fedora.
Jokes on you, this happened to me on fedora with an nvidia gpu.
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Shouldn't update come before upgrade?
Yup
Debian users:
What do you mean by PPA?
Also: apt-get is intended as low-level APT interface for scripts, just use apt instead. I get why people are confused nowadays, because APT documentation is terrible.
apt-getis intended as low-level APT interface for scripts
Ah, that's what they call it now.
I wonder to what they degraded dpkg then?
Isn't dpkg just the program that installs DEB files, without handling dependency resolution?
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This meme brought to you by outdated packages in the official repo
Mfw I get to go through the same yt-dlp steps after a fresh install
Why -Syyu and not -Syu?
You ... you understand pacman cli switches?
Yes. -Syyu is for "Sync (repository action), database update (forced), upgrade packages", in that order (though the flags don't have to be). Doubling a lowercase character like yy or uu is to force the operation. yy in particular shouldn't be needed, as it only overrides the "is your database recent" check. Unless you're updating more than every 5 minutes, using a single y is perfectly fine.
Fedora: sudo dnf update, type the letter y, done.
I don't understand why apt still has update and upgrade as two separate things.
You can even add the -y flag to skip typing y. Which apparently doesn't work for pacman judging by the command above
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I’m more of a fan of just adding the -y parameter to skip the question and go straight to updating. Works with the install command too.
Never had an update break on headless Debian. Even when switching from 12 to 13. That shit is solid.
I'm getting used to arch on my main desktop and I still can't figure out why the hell "sync" is the wording pacman uses for updating or why 'y' is refresh. Sync refresh upgrade my ass. I will admin, it is fast.
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sudo nix-rebuild switch
uhm, akshually it's sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
This is the way.
nix flake update
nix flake check --no-build
git commit -a
nh os switch
Is the routine I've settled into. Flake update because I use flakes, flake check because it's easier to see any warnings about deprecated options and the like so I can fix them preemptively, git commit after the check to avoid back-to back commits where the second is fixing some issue with the first, and nh because I like the pretty dependency graph and progress bar.
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Using Debian as my main laptop distro, I am usually an arch user but figured with it being a light weight laptop I wouldn't need arch, its been fine but installing updates can be frustrating, after a few weeks gnomes appstore breaks, then I need to use terminal to apt update, apt --fix-broken install.
Which Debian distribution are you using, stable, testing, unstable?
I take care of a couple machines for family members. Those have Debian stable with automatic update (unattended-upgrade). I can't recall the system or packages ever breaking. At most users are a bit confused when an update change the UI a bit.
Sticking to stable and avoiding third party repos gives a pretty solid system. Only developers or sysadmins might consider Debian testing. Only people working on Debian itself should use unstable.
--noconfirm
guix upgrade
That's because you have to use
apt
, not apt-get. Yes, there is a difference
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Or sudo dnf -y upgrade
$ doas apk -U upgrade
Pacman sucks ass and this is a hill I will die on. Sure, it's fast, but there's such a thing as too fast. Like when I was updating the system once and it decided to delete bash to replace it, but it couldn't replace it because bash was gone already and my shell died since that's what I was logging in with. Oops! System is completely unusable now, got to reinstall arch again, because pacman pulls stunts like this.
There's no way that's true, right? Surely, the program would be smarter?
You would think that, but it happened to me several times over the course of about five years, with different parts of the core of the os. Granted, this was back when arch was in its infancy, before systemd was even a thing, so pacman may be smarter now. But I've completely written it off since it happened so many times. And reinstalling arch back them took the better part of a weekend, so it's not like it was an easy fix.
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topgrade --no-retry --cleanup --yes
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