This has never been a problem for me. But when I'm running Debian I mostly run testing anyway. Also rarely a problem there. On Arch I run sudo pacman -Syu almo

This has never been a problem for me. But when I'm running Debian I mostly run testing anyway. Also rarely a problem there. On Arch I run sudo pacman -Syu almost every day. You could run something like this to get a warning if there is anything that requires manual intervention: https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant I also run my laptop with Snapper: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/snapper I use a btrfs root volume with btrfs subvolumes instead of separate partitions. I have snapper setup with a pacman hook to take a snapshot before and after every pacman run. So worst case, if something goes horribly wrong, I can boot from an Arch install image into a previous snapshot and unbreak things.