this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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I'm running 4 Debian machines, all configured to automatically update every night, and this has never happened to me.
I've come to notice that a lot of Linux memery is always related to anecdotal impressions or events prevalent around 2 to 3 decades ago. That or fringe stuff that 99% of users wouldn't ever even consider to do in the first place.
i added 10 different ppa to my sources.list and it broke everything!!! why did debian do this?!?
In other words, grasping at straws.
I've been on Linux for about twenty five years and Debian has been the most painless. I'm currently on Pop!_OS on my daily driver laptop and plan to use LMDE in the future for everything without an NVidia GPU in it. Simply put, I ain't got time to tinker and fight my personal computer when I am being paid to fix enterprise production environments.
"update" here referring to the version update, eg bullseye to bookworm. hence the title
sources.listsbecause version updates disable all ppas.Also, because of the "stable" nature of things, instead of a slow trickle of updates, when you finally update the version, you get a flood of updates. Changing from $PACKAGE version 5 to $PACKAGE version 9 very likely has breaking config changes... Avoiding breaking config changes is the entire purpose of a "stable" distro right?
If on arch, you get those breaking changes once a month, a two year release cycle means that the update to the next debian will have 24 breaking changes involved that you get to deal with all at the same time, while accounting for the fact that your /etc/apt/sources.list.d are all disabled.
The meme text itself refers to "frequent" updates. Seems weird to compare apples to oranges, since release updates are not frequent. Even still, updating from buster to bookworm was relatively painless; certainly not 3 hours of reconfiguration. Before that, I was on Ubuntu, and the release updates were also painless; I remember multiple times not needing to do anything except uncomment the sources.list(.d) changes.
[edit: Another quick point. Since Debian/Ubuntu manage configuration for you to some extent, you don't need to fix configuration files as often as you would need to on Arch, hence not needing to do ~20+ config changes for two years of updates all at once.]
The point of the meme is "Debian users are so proud of not having frequent updates... but when they do update, they have a huge backlog of things to update" ... so yes, the fact that it's not apples to oranges, and yet Debian users act superior is kinda the point.
And I use arch on my desktops but debian on my servers. I understand the difference. and yes, 20+ config changes is a bit of an exaggeration. I more frequently have to do minor tweaks to fix things on arch, but I also don't need to set aside time to do arch updates "just in case" ... because I have had debian upgrades cause weird side effects that wound up taking up my whole day.
The fact that i can go 2 years between those weird update days means I will still use it for my server, because "just security upgrades" is good enough for a server (even though I would love to have an updated tmux and neovim, so i could share config files, but oh well, i can go without config files on my server, debian DOESNT manage user config files, definitely not any more than arch does.). I don't "not get it" or something. I understand why people use debian, I use it in certain contexts, but it does also have it's own set of drawbacks.
I use debian stable as my everyday workstation in 3 computers and had been using it for 14 years. I dont complain cause I know what the prize of true stability is and still think it's totally worth it. And at least in my short experience, I never experienced any update issues apart from the two times I blindly created a Frankenstein Debian.