Yeah, maybe I'm just not smart enough but I always have the best luck with Debian/Ubuntu style distros. I'm glad Arch users are happy with Arch, it just doesn't work for me

sudo dpkg --configure -a

my beloved

Define 'Break'... /j

Agreed. I ran a system upgrade at home and then went to a coffee shop. My machine didn't boot at the coffee shop. I installed Fedora instead of doing what I had gone there to do

You must be very lucky then. I've seen it happen so many times.

apt-get is intended as low-level APT interface for scripts

Ah, that's what they call it now.

I wonder to what they degraded dpkg then?

I thought apt-get was a transitional command made so that the devs could make a breaking change, but now that that is done, its no longer needed

Also you usually do update before upgrade, not after

Mfw I get to go through the same yt-dlp steps after a fresh install

You ... you understand pacman cli switches?

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.

You can even add the -y flag to skip typing y. Which apparently doesn't work for pacman judging by the command above

I’m more of a fan of just adding the -y parameter to skip the question and go straight to updating. Works with the install command too.

Don't use gnome appstore. It's always broken

Which Debian distribution are you using, stable, testing, unstable?

I take care of a couple machines for family members. Those have Debian stable with automatic update (unattended-upgrade). I can't recall the system or packages ever breaking. At most users are a bit confused when an update change the UI a bit.

Sticking to stable and avoiding third party repos gives a pretty solid system. Only developers or sysadmins might consider Debian testing. Only people working on Debian itself should use unstable.

Yep. I'm on Debian for many years now. Every broken update I can recall was either caused by an undocumented PPA or nvidia drivers (which have finally been fixed, for my card at least)

I don't see much of a difference between the two. That's why now I'm uninstalling everything I use everyday and put them back as "portable" variants - downloaded as tarballs from their sites, github, or downloaded from Arch's archive. Already did that with Telegram, Pinta and the browser, soon Audacious will meet the same fate cuz for some reason it uses GTK2, not GTK3 as it should. Plus, having them as tarballs means I can have better versions than those in mint's repo.

Too bad that pacman can't be used on Mint, that would be awesome!

sudo emerge -avuDUg world

--changed-use, -U:

• Tells emerge to include installed packages where USE flags have changed since installation. This option also implies the --selective option. Unlike --newuse, the --changed-use option does not trigger reinstallation when flags that the user has not enabled are added or removed.

--getbinpkg [ y | n ], -g:

• Using the server and location defined in PORTAGE_BINHOST (see make.conf(5)), portage will download the information from each binary package found and it will use that information to help build the dependency list. This option implies -k. (Use -gK for binary-only merging.)

Flatpak, not pack *

Did you decide to use that instead of the normal distro package manager or is there a distro which actually only has pkcon for the CLI?

That's ok you can finish it later