Many bitter experiences over the years have taught me to be scared to death of any and all updates. Is this still warranted? [closed]

Question

I've been using Ubuntu for five, maybe six, years. I love it, though at times it's been more love/hate. In this time I've done hundreds of installs, many necessitated by me naively allowing the system to update itself. Countless times after updating and rebooting I've been greeted with boot failures, video card driver regression failures, log in loops, sound card failures, printers vanishing- there's no shortage of terrible things that have happened after what should have been innocent updates.

So for the last year or so I've turned off any automatic updating. I do my 'updates' only when I do fresh installs. I just choose a newer distro and that's my update.

So my question: is my fear of updating still warranted? Or have updates gotten less vicious in recent years? I'd like to turn on Automatic updates for Important Security updates, but honestly, with my history it still makes me tremble.

Answer 1

I've only been using Ubuntu for about a year-and-a-half (I started with 11.04) so I have far less experience than you, but my experience has been that updates have been very safe and reliable. The only time I ran into problems was when I took someone's advice to add a PPA that included unstable releases (I ended up having to do a complete reinstall and learned a valuable lesson). Of course, nobody can give you any guarantees (our hardware is likely different, if nothing else), but I really believe that you'll be pretty safe if you stick to the Ubuntu repositories and to PPAs that have good reputations for stability and reliability.

For some updates it might also be best to wait a few days and check AskUbuntu and the UbuntuForums for reports of difficulties.

As always, remember to backup; you may never need it, but if you do you'll be very glad you did it.

Answer 2

I have been using Ubuntu for at least 6 years and I have rarely had a problem with updates besides minor problems like conf files being replaced. There was also the time when pulseaudio was being introduced and sound wasn't great for a while.
I have gone through a lot of version upgrades too and never had a failure (maybe I am lucky).

Answer 3

This is my approach to make sure that my productive system is stable, and updates can be performed without risk:

• Always make backups.
  • Do not update software from a ppa unless needed.
  • Avoid installing/upgrading proprietary graphics drivers.
  • Disable the proposed repository.
  • Disable the backports repository.
  • Automatically install security updates only.
  • Never install software from source or from "alien" packages.
  • Only install software I really need, don't install software just for testing.
  • Upgrade my distribution only after waiting for some weeks after release.
• Yes, always make backups.

Note in addition: I have restricted and Third-Party repositories enabled, because I need these. But if you don't need applications from there deactivate these too.

Doing so warrants me with a stable, always running system with no proplems at all. In case I want to test software I prefer to do so on another machine, mostly this will be a virtual machine where I can quickly remove the application in case I do not like it, and where I am easily able to restore my snapshots.