I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.

as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all

It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.

But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.

In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

I think it’s easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.

Something like ‘find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} ; | grep yourdirectory’ and work from there. I don’t think there’s an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.

Exactly. You can build rules with ufw and view them on iptables. Maybe the one thing ufw does better out of the box is persistent rules and simpler “firewall on/off” switch, but specially on this particular question I don’t think they matter.

They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it’s still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.

Debian. I’ve had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I’ve worked with ‘set and forget’ setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you’ll still have options to fix it assuming you’re comfortable with plain old terminal.

Can you switch to console? Try ctrl+alt+F2 when the system is booted up and log in to that.

I suppose some package update was interrupted or crashed. You can attempt to re-run what’s missing with ‘sudo apt-get install’ and ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a’. And, assuming your console access works, you can at least check log files on what’s wrong, but for that I don’t think any generic ‘read /var/log/syslog’ file is too helpful as there’s a ton of stuff and with things like journalctl it’s pretty difficult to navigate around if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

And also, more details would be helpful. What you mean by ‘enters a loop’, what it actually says that went wrong and so on.

Dammit, my organic memory failed yet again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that prompt (and I have agreed to that as well at least few times).

Does anyone sell ‘Yes, Do As I Say!’ stickers?

You could possibly recover from that on console, just install few metapackages. And have backups.

We’ve all been there. If you do this stuff for a living, you’ve done that way more than once.

You’d think you’d learn from your mistakes

Yes, that what you’d think. And then you’ll sit with a blank terminal once again when you did some trivial mistake yet again.

A friend of mine developed a habit (working on a decent sized ISP 20+ years ago) to set up a scheduled reboot for everything in 30 minutes no matter what you’re going to do. The hardware back then (I think it was mostly cisco) had a ‘running conrfig’ and ‘stored config’ which were two separate instances. Log in, set up scheduled reboot, do whatever you’re planning to do and if you mess up and lock yourself out the system will restore to previous config in a while and then you can avoid the previous mistake. Rinse and repeat.

And, personally, I think that’s the one of the best ways to differentiate actual professionals from ‘move fast and break things’ group. Once you’ve locked yourself out of the system literally half way across the globe too many times you’ll eventually learn to think about the next step and failovers. I’m not that much of a network guy, but I have shot myself in the foot enough that whenever there’s dd, mkfs or something similar on the root shell I automatically pause for a second to confirm the command before hitting enter.

And while you gain experience you also know how to avoid the pitfalls, the more important part (at least for myself) is to think ahead. The constant mindset of thinking about processes, connectivity, what you can actually do if you fuck up and so on becomes a part of your workflow. Accidents will happen, no matter how much experience you have. The really good admins just know that something will go wrong at some point in the process and build stuff to guarantee that when you fuck things up you still have availability to fix it instead of calling someone 6 timezones away in the middle of the night to clean up your mess.

The one thing I always forget, no matter how many DNAT setups or whatever I write with iptables.

True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn’t belong.

But it’s not obvious either. When I say ‘apt install firefox’, specially after adding their repository to sources.list, I’d expect to get a .deb from mozilla. Silently overriding my commands rubs me in a very wrong way.

If only there was some other alternative than throw my old stuff in the bin.

Edit: I missed the ‘un’ on ‘unsupported’. It’s supposed to be a joke.

Ubuntu or something based on it

I would not recommend ubuntu, specially on this case. System updates, snapd mostly, have gone downhill and it’s nearly impossible to avoid reboots for extended periods. Debian seems to be still as solid as it’s always been.