• Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 years ago

        Well in an immutable distro, there is little to no chance for the system to end up in an unusable state (I guess it is the same for distros which apply the updates atomically). Traditional distros are far more likely to bork when so much shit is updated at once

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 years ago

          As an anecdote (and not statistics) I have distro upgraded OpenSUSE with 5000 packages to install (thanks TeXlive LaTeX). It was fine.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          0·
          2 years ago

          I don’t think this is true. The package manager is there for a reason to prevent that. If you have more updates to install at a time, then the chances are the same as if you would have installed the problematic update one at a time. Just read the manual intervention information from Arch and see if there is something to do, then it won’t bork. If people don’t know what they are doing and do not read the additional information (that is required to do so on Arch), well yes, then you could end up borking your machine. But not because so many updates are installed at a time. The package manager and operating system and their maintainer designed it in a way that you can install ton of updates at a time without borking. This is fine.

          • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            2 years ago

            Between this comment about arch and the other comment about opensuse, it must only be apt which has issues with large updates with complicated dependency chains. I remember 5-6 years ago Ubuntu borking itself when I tried to update after a decent gap and had 100+ packages to update. There is also the fact that people used to advice me to make a clean install in lieu of updating whenever a new version of Ubuntu dropped.

            • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
              0·
              2 years ago

              Before my switch, i used Ubuntu exclusively for 13 years in row. I always heard of problems (and not at least because of the PPA repositories) when upgrading from one major version to the next, be it a LTS or not. I never did that and always installed fresh because of these stories. Mostly 4 years in between, or sometimes 2.

              Its entirely possible that most problems happened because of packages from PPA that the user did not change for the new upgrade. Because PPA repositories were often designed for a specific version of Ubuntu. So its not entirely the fault of the apt package manager in that case.

              • superkret@feddit.org
                0·
                2 years ago

                No, it’s just that Ubuntu never correctly upgrades between releases.
                I’ve tried so many times, and it basically always failed.

    • SitD@lemy.lol
      0·
      2 years ago

      😂 they always sneak a rotten little package into these big lists man

      • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 years ago

        I used Tumbleweed for eight years with no problems. I only moved to EndeavourOS because Suse bared their corporate teeth and I got fed up being a couple of generations behind on the Nvidia drivers. EndeavourOS is also good.

        • Konstant@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years ago

          My problem with EndeavourOS is that it is terminal centered. I prefer GUI. Don’t think it has a package manager gui.

          • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
            0·
            2 years ago

            You can install Octopi or Pamac which both handle the standard repositories and the aur. I don’t know if they handle flatpak or snap though.

            • Konstant@lemmy.world
              0·
              2 years ago

              I believe I tried Pamac in a VM and it didn’t work properly. Or it didn’t exist in the repôs. I might check it out again if I have time.

      • WeAreAllOne@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Used tumbleweed for ages. No issues. Switched to slowroll again with no issues. Now trying fedora. All with Kde plasma.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Got busy and didn’t update my template for awhile. Machines would be instantiated a few minors back. 9.2 vs 9.4, for instance, but this was back in 7-land.

    Updates would be about 600 packages, or most of the install.

    Took 5 min, completely safe. Patch, bounce because we looked funny at dbus so it can’t cope, and then good to go.

    I used to tease my windows peer: he’d be still on “do not turn off your computer”.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Sometimes I wish someone would make a an Arch box and come back to it years later to see the updates it has missed.

    But that’s assuming an Arch box would be reliable enough to stay alive that long lol.

    Always heard of 20+ year old bsd and debian machines chugging along with no issue.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I have updated arch systems that had not been powered on for years before. It was fine. No issues what so ever. Arch is not some flaky distro that breaks if you look away for a minute. My main system has had had the same install for over 5 years now and I regularly forget to update it for months at a time. Again, no issues.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        Yeah really the biggest issue I could see is pacman’s keyring being so out of date that it has to be manually refreshed with a new one

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

      At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

      If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…