• mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months 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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 months 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…

      • superkret@feddit.org
        0·
        4 months ago

        Yes, you can. You can even update Arch after a year. But you’ll have to do a few more steps than just pacman -Syu

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      4 months 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·
        4 months 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        Yeah really the biggest issue I could see is pacman’s keyring being so out of date that it has to be manually refreshed with a new one

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      4 months ago

      I had that on a physical machine! It broke hardcore lol I had to reinstall the OS after trying to update

  • nomen_dubium@startrek.website
    0·
    4 months ago

    welp, looks like you don’t use python virtualenvs… well i guess jokes on you all your shit is probably broken now (and as a bonus, that’s probably a big part of the donwload size as well) :p

  • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    4 months ago

    people laughed at me for choosing debian. they asked why i chose to have ancient runes running in my computer

    who’s laughing now?

    • dan@upvote.au
      0·
      4 months ago

      My personal prod systems never have many upgrades… But they’re running Debian stable and I have unattended-upgrades installed and configured.

      • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        4 months 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·
          4 months 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·
          4 months 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·
            4 months 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·
              4 months 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·
                4 months 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·
      4 months ago

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