> As a ubuntu user, I find that I cross my fingers every time I run sudo apt-get upgrade. About half the time I get broken builds and once a year my OS will jus

> As a ubuntu user, I find that I cross my fingers every time I run sudo apt-get upgrade. About half the time I get broken builds and once a year my OS will just flat out crash from it, or fail to reboot in virtual box. What I'm about to say has been said a thousand times, but I guess we need to keep saying it as long as this myth survives. Are you using PPAs? Are you using PPAs that provide newer versions of software that also ships with the system? Are you using third-party drivers (looking at you, Nvidia)? If so, there's your problem. It's not that difficult to blast away your PPAs with "ppa-purge" prior to running a distribution upgrade. As for regular package updates - "apt-get upgrade" won't break a system, that's not been already severely broken by the user. Period. I use Ubuntu on the desktop and the server, and have done many upgrades over many versions. I don't recall a post-upgrade broken system in recent years that wasn't due to third-party stuff. Even then, it's trivial to fix - reboot to recovery mode if you can't get your X11 on, "apt-get purge" the offending stuff, reboot and carry on. My impression is that Ubuntu screwed up on a major version upgrade several years ago, and their upgrade process is still being dinged by folks due to the wave of bad publicity that that incident created. Which is a shame, because Ubuntu post 12.04 is a rock-solid operating system that is a joy to use (upgrading included). Granted, third-party packages can sometimes reduce the overall stability, but then what do you expect? It helps to carefully vet which PPAs you use - PPAs that are done by people who know what they're doing don't tend to cause trouble. If you want a rock-solid system, do a clean install of an LTS release, don't set up PPAs, and enjoy. I have a side Thinkpad with 12.04 on it which is exactly that, and it's the most stable system I've ever used. And it's being kept current with security patches and bugfixes with regular "apt-get upgrade".