Genuine question… how?
Every time I’ve tried to run a standard Linux distro like Ubuntu for more than a couple of years I inevitably end up breaking something in a way that I can’t recover.
Are you taking snapshots to roll back to?
Every time I’ve tried to run a standard Linux distro like Ubuntu for more than a couple of years I inevitably end up breaking something in a way that I can’t recover.
Are you taking snapshots to roll back to?
If you install the newest versions of whatever from random repos or compile stuff yourself you are very likely to mess things up. But nowadays there is very little reason to do that. And you can pick a distro that releases at a pace you are comfortable with, so you have choices.
Usually broken distro upgrades I see are because people run "curl randomdomain.ck/totallysafescript.sh | sudo bash -" to install things or use custom repos.
That `totallysafescript.sh` could at least be inside of the package manager scope. Most of the times someone already did it, and published it to AUR.
IMO the reason why there are so many people running random scripts in Ubuntu/Debian is due to how more difficult/inconvenient it is to get a dpkg .deb when compared to a PKGBUILD file. Same for MacOS, in which you have to either rely on Homebrew wizardry or just running the script
The AUR is still not as good as proper package management and shouldn't be considered a stable or reliable method of software distribution at scale.
I've been running rolling release distros for a decade and never had any problems - you have to follow some software migrations when needed, but I managed to migrate to systemd on Arch without an issue while any dist upgrade on ubuntu was wrecking my system.
It's not a good distro. I don't know why people insist on using it. Notice that the GP said Debian instead. (Probably Stable, because testing and unstable will break within 10 years.)