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Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

Linux doesn't magically update itself. If it works today, it's going to work tomorrow unless you break it.

I dunno about that. Bleeding edge distros like Arch are infamous for breaking in random ways for those updating without paying attention and even distros that are considered more stable like Fedora and Ubuntu can from time to time break drivers or random smaller things. Definitely a YMMV sort of thing.

What are we going to do, then? Stop updating the OS and accumulate security issues? Stop doing anything that might possible touch an obscure config file somewhere in the bowels of the OS? It’s just unrealistic. "Do not update" cannot be a solution, it’s worse than the problem it is supposed to solve.

I’m responding to someone pretending their system randomly breaks in the morning as per magic. This simply doesn’t happen, period.

A Linux system stays the same unless you change it.

I also personally disagree that updates break system by the way. I have used Arch for more than a decade and has yet to experience one of this alleged frequent disturbance.

You said magic twice attacking me but I said it zero times. It's just not even a "good" bad read of what I did say.

What I'm talking about is changes because of updates, yes. Auto updates, or ones I did, or an update to specific software that caused a library update to break something else. All that counts as "me changing it" sure. Like I said I guess I need a system a little less prone to breaking because of my actions. I'm a programmer not a linux admin.

Not sure what point you’re making, are you saying to never update your system?

Not updating your system is not a magic solution either. I ran Linux Mint for 9mo and twice during that time I ended up in a bizarre situation:

1. the menu bar, or whatever it’s called (taskbar/dock equivalent) had disappeared on boot and I spent about 2 hours trying to get it back

2. the system simply wouldn’t boot into Cinnamon anymore; I ended up reinstalling

Bought a MBP and while it has some annoying quirks I don’t have any crazy ruined-my-day issues anymore.

By the same token, mac os isn't going to change in unpredictable ways if you never update it either.

Alas the cross of a dumbass programmer is a heavy one. I need an OS that is harder to break I reckon.

I too am especially prone to breaking my OS, as well as the software that runs on it. You aren't alone lol.

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