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Comment by masto | Hacker News Reader

Your experience differs from mine. If I only count major incidents, I've had at least two occasions where a Linux operating system update completely hosed my system. One was a Rackspace VPS I never managed to recover, I had to use their management tools to download a binary image of the unbootable disk and fuss around to mount it and get my files off so I could build a new server.

I'm very hesitant to touch Linux updates, but I am occasionally "forced to" when I need to run a new piece of software that ends up being like pulling on a loose string on a sweater.

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That's quite strange. What distro? For a while I was managing several hundred Linux devices remotely, so I've done thousands of updates with no issues. Linux has been my daily driver for 15 years, and never had an update issue there (that I didn't create myself). Specifically the thing I've NEVER had an issue with was a standard system update. Apt upgrade, pacman or yay -SYU, things of that nature. Had plenty of problems when trying to do weird shit, but I've also learned how to solve those problems. I've never borked an important system so bad it became unrecoverable. Some distros are prone to update failure because they always give you bleeding edge releases. I'd suggest running Debian, a ridiculously stable "fire and forget" system. Many rolling distros, like Arch, I'd say to update every couple of days to avoid dependency chain problems. But again, none of this is difficult beyond having to read some documentation, and none of this should even be able to cause system loss. Did you do something else weird that you forgot to mention?

In answer to the question, no, I did not forget to mention that I did anything "weird". It was apt-get upgrade.

I'm not going to have an argument about my personal experience. You can find plenty of others in the comments who have had similar problems. I enjoyed the response, as I've been joking for 20+ years that 95% of the time Linux advocates will tell anyone running into issues "you're using the wrong distro".

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