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I can't speak to all distributions but Debian and derivatives are actually pretty good about not leaving the system in an unrecoverable state. The only times I

I can't speak to all distributions but Debian and derivatives are actually pretty good about not leaving the system in an unrecoverable state. The only times I hear about an `apt update` breaking is when someone runs out of disk space or has created a FrankenDebian with third-party repos. These failures are not always straightforward to fix, but they are generally recoverable. The systems are knowable because they are open source and lots of people are familiar with their inner workings. Contrast with Mac and Win, which are essentially black boxes that only the company's developers understand (if we're lucky). It's been more than a decade since I used Win or Mac for anything important but back then the standard advice before any major upgrade was "make a backup" because these had a reasonable chance of putting your system into a state that required a reinstall.

darthrupert 4y ago
>I can't speak to all distributions but Debian and derivatives are actually pretty good about not leaving the system in an unrecoverable state. They sure do, and I cannot remember the last time my Arch Linux would have broken because of an upgrade. While the packaging systems of Linux distributions are pretty damned good, I believe their stability is more due to great individual efforts of the package developers than any systematic design principle. Also the stability of critical upstream packages has improved greatly. NixOS's stability derives more from systematic design, but perhaps ironically, NixOS is the only Linux distro I remember having soft bricked in the last 5 years by running an upgrade.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I've borked both my Arch installations and NixOS (by my own stupidly, not just upgrades) a couple of times. What's really fresh with NixOS is how easy it is to go back, just reboot and select the image from when the system worked. Getting a Arch installation to work after borking it can be a bit harder.

darthrupert 4y ago

>I can't speak to all distributions but Debian and derivatives are actually pretty good about not leaving the system in an unrecoverable state. They sure do, and I cannot remember the last time my Arch Linux would have broken because of an upgrade. While the packaging systems of Linux distributions are pretty damned good, I believe their stability is more due to great individual efforts of the package developers than any systematic design principle. Also the stability of critical upstream packages has improved greatly. NixOS's stability derives more from systematic design, but perhaps ironically, NixOS is the only Linux distro I remember having soft bricked in the last 5 years by running an upgrade.

capableweb 4y ago
I've borked both my Arch installations and NixOS (by my own stupidly, not just upgrades) a couple of times. What's really fresh with NixOS is how easy it is to go back, just reboot and select the image from when the system worked. Getting a Arch installation to work after borking it can be a bit harder.