Now that you mention it, I remember rolling back by reinstalling old packages stored in cache, but not rolling back to a specific date. On dnf I once had to roll-back an update, and that is managed by transaction number (let’s say revert the last update), so it’s good if you don’t know which package exactly is causing the issue.
Upgrading, like from Debian 12 to 13. It’s too complex, and if you install anything out of the ordinary (which you have to if you want packages from this decade), things get even more complicated.
I’ve used the same Arch installation for 14 years and only had issues when we switched to from sysvinit to systemd in 2012 because I didn’t read the news. Easily fixable though
In my experience, Ubuntu and Debian are by far the most likely to break during an upgrade
apt doesn’t even have rollbacks
Apt is one of the worst package managers I’ve used. Yum is also trash, dnf a bit better. But pacman is by far the best
I haven’t used pacman in ages and I don’t remember rolling back updates with it so I either never needed to or it was not possible at the time.
dnf did everything I needed it to so I wouldn’t know what to fault it for
You can very easily rollback updates from cache, and even rollback all your packages to a specific date in time.
It does get a bit iffy with AUR packages because you often compile them locally, so they would need to be recompiled from a specific commit.
Now that you mention it, I remember rolling back by reinstalling old packages stored in cache, but not rolling back to a specific date. On dnf I once had to roll-back an update, and that is managed by transaction number (let’s say revert the last update), so it’s good if you don’t know which package exactly is causing the issue.
Debian Stable breaks from updating? What?
Upgrading, like from Debian 12 to 13. It’s too complex, and if you install anything out of the ordinary (which you have to if you want packages from this decade), things get even more complicated.
I’ve used the same Arch installation for 14 years and only had issues when we switched to from sysvinit to systemd in 2012 because I didn’t read the news. Easily fixable though
I upgraded my machine from Debian 10 all the way to Debian 13 recently. Never had a problem.