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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The āunless you know what youāre doingā part tells me itās totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.
Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, itās awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.
Iām utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually⢠or soonā¢. Havenāt learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess itās ok. Or maybe I just know what Iām doingā¦
Agreed. š Arch and pacman definitely adheres to this philosophy of "unless you know what you're doing". Pacman allows this type of selective upgrade, and it allows to ignore any package you like during a system/all-package upgrade, which may or may not break the system.
You can also post-install make changes to the database of installed packages, like change the install reason for a package (as a dependency or as explicitly installed).
All these things are happily executed without warning. š
The reason for the need to check the news is that the system can have any combination of package versions installed, and requiring manual intervention by the user in any quirky upgrade situations helps to keep the complexity down of the system and package manager. I think it's worth the low complexity.
The overhead of checking the website is super low. It's basically the same as checking the release notes when there's a new version of Ubuntu, or whatever other software you might be curious of. Same thing.