>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, a

>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.