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Comment by UserRights | Hacker News Reader

This is BS. I am using debian since many years and apt-get dist-upgrade never blows up anything.

Debian is one of the distros I use for long term installations because it is the only distro that gets release upgrades right, it is no problem using the same installation for several years and jump across several releases. Of course you should read the release notes, but what you are saying is the opposite of my real life experience. Of course it is also very easy to just reinstall.

Writing "every dist-upgrade blows something up" is an indication that you must be doing something very wrong with that computer in front of you. Please provide some bug reports.

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> This is BS.

No, it's not. The parent is reporting a personal experience. Just like you.

Back in 2009 when I switched to Arch, one of the reasons why I switched was because dist-upgrade frequently blew up on me and I didn't know how to fix it.

Maybe it was user error. Maybe I didn't know what I was doing. Maybe Arch just empowered me to understand my system better. I don't really know what the reason is, but nevertheless, the experience isn't bullshit. It really happens.

I believe an important reason why Arch is easier to maintain has to do with its minimal package customization:

Applications already have their own learning curve, custom packaging only adds to this. Just reading the documentation or googling for answers may not be enough, one also needs to understand how and why packagers have changed things to be different from upstream.

Personally, I prefer the Arch way of keeping package customization to the bare minimum. Combined with the very simple package format and powerful tools, Arch is a winner.

"dist-upgrade frequently"

Why would you run dist-upgrade frequently?

Its hard to diagnose a bug report like that, BUT, one reason to run dist-upgrade frequently would be if you're tracking unstable or testing especially during the early times of a dev cycle. Don't do that. Run unstable or testing I mean. Its a "let you shoot yourself in your foot if you insist on doing it" type thing. Unstable will tend to be unstable...

You should have to run dist-upgrade exactly one day per release cycle if you run stable. You may have to run it twice for certain historical upgrades lost in the mists of time, so I can't say it never happens and always only run it once per release cycle.

I think you may have misinterpreted. I didn't run dist-upgrade frequently, rather, the ratio of failure was high.

(This my memory from 6-7 years ago. For all I know, it could have failed twice because I did something stupid, didn't know it, and moved on.)

My central point is calling someone's else's experience bullshit, is, well, bullshit. My comment has little to do with anything else.

Never blows up on anything? I guess the times I tried and failed to dist-upgrade my laptop were just a bad dream... Nothing never blows up. I've had pretty serious issues doing dist upgrades and linux version updates where my hardware (drivers) no longer worked without warning.

That said obviously it works most of the time. Otherwise noone would use it. Myself included.

It is clearly a lie. Another lie, "Arch is as stable as you make it".

I LOVE LOVE ARCH. I use OpenSUSE at work. It is 100% my choice and I always feel that Arch is great, in production I have to many little things that just need a few moments of attention.

I find Debian and Ubuntu to be also problematic for dist-upgrades and have been using my main work computer for 3.5 years with the same install. It is not unique to Arch to keep a system clean. Zypper in SUSE is also very capable of keeping things clean by just doing a zypper dup to go back to vanilla install again. If you read the forums of SUSE and the forums of Debian you will see a historical issue with Debian which I heard has gotten MUCH better.

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