[pessimizer]

It's got to be the hardware. Most people don't have two or three hours fixing their desktop after an update. I use Debian Testing, and I can't remember the last time an update went bad; it's been years.

If you use bleeding-edge hardware with an OS that vendors aren't specifically targeting, expect problems. I gave up trying to put Linux on random new laptops, so I've researched compatibility ahead of every purchase I've made in the last 10 years. Also, if you buy from a vendor that specializes in Linux, there will be a markup, but you will also get assurances and support.

We can pretend like that's a failure on the part of Linux, but Apple only gives you like five choices of machine, while Linux runs at least somewhat on every random computer-like object.

[martinald]

Feel like I'm on a different planet to a lot of these desktop Linux users.

I've used desktop Linux since the late 90s - Redhat 6 was the first disto I used.

I have had uncountable complete system failures since then. As the parent says doing a dist-upgrade has a very non-0 chance of completely bricking the system. I've even had apt brick itself multiple times through normal upgrades.

Linux on the desktop for me over the past 25 years has been hilariously unreliable, by far the most buggy software I have used over my career.

Linux on the server is flawless and I use it all the time, but the amount of software installed compared to desktop usage is tiny, and I don't do dist upgrades on servers (would rebuilt it onto another machine).

For me after 25 years of various attempts the most reliable desktop "Linux" is actually Windows with WSL2. All hardware works great, sleep works, Bluetooth works, display scaling works, WiFi6E works etc. And I have a great Linux machine thru WSL2.

[Delk]

What really sounds like something with the setup is not right to me is that Beached seems to say they have to cross their fingers every time they run just a plain update, not a release upgrade.

I remember often having to fix something when dist-upgrading Ubuntu when I used it on personal desktops between ~2005 and ~2014. I can't remember what kinds of issues there were, and apparently none of them entirely bricked the systems beyond repair since the same install survived throughout those years, but I remember it wasn't flawless.

But random breakage from standard updates within release is not something I remember happening on Debian, Ubuntu or modern Fedora with any frequency. (Except when I ran Debian unstable before Ubuntu, but that's a different story.) Double digit percentages, or even integer ones, do indeed sound like they are from a different planet.

I switched away from Ubuntu on the desktop over some dissatisfactions nearly a decade ago (and I never really ran Kubuntu) so I don't have much experience with that from recent years. But I've now had the same install of Fedora since 2014 that's gone through more release upgrades than I care to count, and while release upgrades still have a non-zero chance of breaking something, standard updates have been pretty much flawless.

I suspect there's something rather different about the setups of people who report no issues and that of someone who says standard updates frequently break in mainstream distros. Either there's a hardware difference or a difference in some kinds of 5% needs for the setup -- such as some specific software, specific peripherals, or specific needs. E.g. someone doing sound production might be much more likely to run into sound issues than someone whose sound needs are Netflix on USB headphones.

My last couple of personal devices have been ThinkPads that I picked in part specifically for the compatibility. The previous one with almost everything Intel worked pretty much 100% issue-free for years. I can imagine that if I instead had a random-brand consumer laptop or desktop, a wifi card with some kind of flaky half-support, proprietary NVidia drivers, some slightly niche peripherals, and the need to run some kind of a proprietary application dynamically linking with shared libraries from 2017, the story might be quite different.

Of course it might also be that some of us are just so used to dealing with fixing small issues or skirting around them that they just don't register for us any more. I think that's something that might also happen for some people -- tinkering is so natural that it doesn't feel like tinkering so tinkering doesn't exist -- and I wonder if that's part of the difference in the reported experiences.

But if someone reports a double-digit percentage of stuff breaking on a standard update, there's something else going on as well.

[martinald]

Yes, I think if you pick hardware specifically for Linux you'll have far less problems and this may explain the difference.

Having said that, my RaPi has got in a bad apt state twice now which should be fairly 'mainstream' as hardware goes (as in a lot of people running the exact same configuration).

I think you may be right with what you consider bricking too. I would consider the system bricked if a dist-upgrade succeeded (system boots ok) but apt is in a bad state after, as it can take hours to resolve that.

I think also I have a lot less tolerance for this after running Mac and Windows for so long (I've only recently started using Windows again once WSL became stable, before that it was basically just Mac). I have never had a bricked upgrade from that.

[Delk]

I agree apt or dpkg ending up in a bad state would probably mean bricking for lots of people. It's something I remember also having to do in some cases after dist-upgrades.

I remember having occasionally dealt with having to manually run dpkg reconfigure to install packages that had somehow ended up in a semi-installed state during an upgrade, or some other similar bad state. To someone who's not familiar with the distro's internals, and probably to some who are, that would just appear as a mysteriously broken system that no longer operates.

I guess for me bricking would be if I can't get the system working again using some kinds of relatively well-documented or known repair steps (that is, known to me or sort of generally). I'm more bothered by something not quite working right and not understanding it than I'm by a complete but repairable bricking that I understand or know how to fix.

That's almost certainly not how most people would perceive it, though.

And even though I'm probably not that averse to fixing things, I also originally moved from Debian unstable to the newly founded Ubuntu because I didn't want to deal with routinely playing sysadmin on my personal box any more.

With that said, I don't know if it's because of stricter checks being made by dnf before package operations or what, but I've never got dnf/rpm into a non-working state on modern Fedora. Despite my old affection for Debian-based distros, I admit that apt/dpkg has seemed more flakey to me after this.

After nine years, I wouldn't even know how to try doing something similar to manually running dpkg reconfigure on Fedora. If that even exists.

(edit: sentence)