Because you’re “sync”ing with the state of the repo. You’re not necessarily upgrading. Sometimes the repos have a lower version than what you have, so you would be downgrading in that case. Or sometimes you’re just using it to install a new package and its dependencies.

-u is upgrade. And -uu is upgrade or downgrade. It’s used to filter the packages that sync operates on, so basically you’re syncing any packages that have a different version than the repo.

-y for refresh? No idea. -r is root, so I guess it was already in use by the time someone added refresh?

I did it on the GUI all day yesterday! The only problem Debian has is being unbreakable!

Heck, I switched repos from bookworm to trixie and installed 3 GiB worth of packages - 2.5k packages - and booted into a PERFECTLY WORKING system!

Installed the other 8 GiB afterwards and booted into a perfectly working system. Just before I thought Steam was broken, I rebooted and it came alive too.

And my GTX 1650 worked right away! Do you know how many times the daily 1 GiB update on Ubuntu breaks that?!

Flatpak updates are kinda' slow, no 4 GiB downloads needed per day, Debian updates arrive at like 200 MiB a month except for apps like VSCode, Signal, or Discord. And - to be honest - that's the Windows-unlike experience every distro is missing.

Debian really is unbreakable.