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Comment by Cloudef | Hacker News Reader

Haven't used debian or debian based systems for many years. They do too much "automagic" things behind your back and thus tend to brick themselves, especially during major updates. Not really sure how they got so popular. The packaging ecosystem is also kinda mess.

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Huh? I have the opposite experience. Major upgrades always went flawlessly for me. With the rolling testing-Release on my workstation/laptop, I sometimes run into dependency problems during upgrades. But these can always be solved by a few standard techniques. Not really beginner-friendly, but quite reliable. I have had many more problems when upgrading Ubuntu installations.

If you are running testing, it doesn't get security updates except through regular package migrations from unstable, so I recommend pulling in security updates from there manually or automatically. At least Firefox and Linux have regular security fixes in unstable, so you might want to use apt pinning to use the unstable versions. You can also use debsecan to automatically and temporarily pin security uploads to unstable using the technique mentioned here:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Best_practices_for_Tes...

What killed Debian for me was when doing an upgrade of Apache and PHP it automatically restarted Apache temporarily without PHP configured, then the upgrade of PHP failed and left Apache running completely without PHP support for a while until someone noticed, and Apache happily kept serving .php files as text/plain during this time.

A package manager should in my opinion leave daemon stopping/starting to the administrator, as they know their configuration better than any package manager ever can.

You can disable automatic daemon restarting in Debian.

It specifically asks you too, but if you just next next next next through life you might miss it.

Also that behavior isn't unique to Debian at all.

Yes, and I'm sure you could in 2013 when this happened as well, but it comes enabled by default and I learned not to enable automatic upgrades on Debian derivatives instead.

These days we mostly deploy our stuff using containers anyway, and for my own personal machines I've just switched to Arch Linux since.

From this comment, I assume you ran testing or unstable.

Stable is great for letting up a server and let it run on its own for years without any maintenance (HN warning: No maintenance is of course never a good idea, but at least Debian made it possible)

Testing ran in update conflicts at least once a month, but it was generally easy to resolve without bricking.

Unstable, well, the name says it all.

Haven't run debian en-mass for a long time, for stable servers I stick the latest ubuntu 2004 and have unattended upgrades on, I haven't had any issues yet

No unstable, just regular release. Same story with ubuntu and friends. Ironically I've had better experience with rolling release distros.

Requesting you take cloud out of your name. We release you from the team. I regret to say we are going to have to provide you with a win11 laptop, and the authorities are on the way to claim the hardware you appear to be currently abusing.

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