[diffeomorphism]

Not PP, but to me it means much less manual intervention/more hooks etc. .

For instance, for debian I can just turn on automatic updates and basically never need manual intervention.

For arch I am not supposed to use automatic updates and have to (!) read the news.

Why? Why does arch need more manual intervention? Sure, I can do that but it just seems like a pointless waste of time.

[matheusmoreira]

> For instance, for debian I can just turn on automatic updates and basically never need manual intervention.

I question what sort of updates you're actually getting. Debian is known for being extremely outdated. This is a major reason for its stability.

Sometimes things change way too much. Sometimes they change in incompatible ways. Sometimes changes come from upstream and there's nothing the distribution can do about it. In these cases, our attention is required. Things break and we need to fix them. We need to adapt.

In order to avoid this, Debian must be outdated. It must avoid updates that break things and this necessarily means you end up using software that's years old. That's fine, it's a perfectly valid trade-off. I'm sure there are a lot of users out there whose wants and needs are perfectly filled by Debian.

If someone's interested in Arch, it's likely because of its huge repository of up-to-date unpatched software. The Arch user must be able to deal with change. Sometimes it's unavoidable and Arch culture makes it clear that users are expected to put such effort into their systems.

[diffeomorphism]

> years old.

where years<=2. Not a big deal, but yes can be annoying. That said upgrades between major versions are also usually automated and well tested (since they have lots of time to prepare and test that).

> users are expected...

The difference is what is considered "unavoidable". In particular, on other distros packagers are supposed to ... and only if that is not possible users are supposed to ...

[m01]

I don't think Debian's automatic updates do major release upgrades automatically, do they? Those IIRC do require manual intervention - if nothing else you need to run the installer & possibly respond to prompts, but possibly more depending on your system.

[pxc]

> I don't think Debian's automatic updates do major release upgrades automatically, do they? Those IIRC do require manual intervention

For major release upgrades, the official upgrade procedure is to follow instructions like these: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/c...

So yeah, you have a somewhat manual upgrade process once every two years, if you're not on one of the rolling release (‘testing’ or ‘unstable’).

On the other hand, you do get to choose when you make those updates. You don't get caught by surprise with them because you forgot to read the news.

Debian's documentation on Testing and Unstable[1] contains some snippets that may feel familiar to Arch users, including this very relevant bit:

> Consider (especially when using unstable) if you need to disable or remove unattended-upgrades in order to control when package updates take place.

—

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#What_are_some_best_pr...