EverNightX: Because that's how rolling release distros (Arch being a popular example) work.
You seem to be used to using point releases like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora.
Generally, I'd say: choose a distro with a schedule that fits your intended use. The quicker the release cycle, the shorter the supported lifetime.
- Rolling release for daily use.
- Point releases + interim releases for regular use.
- Long-term support releases (LTS) for sporadic use and/or focus on system stability.
timppu: Is there a way to update to some interim level, and then to the latest versions, in order to tackle the problem you described, ie. the delta being too big as you haven't updated for ages, hence the update to the latest version fails?
I like the idea of rolling updates because generally I dislike the end-of-life (EOL) of point releases (...).
But the problem is what you described: sometimes I may have an old Linux installation on some old laptop I haven't fired up for many many months, and certainly I'd like to be able to run the updates on it.
Anyway, anyone can reply who knows the answer.
In that one instance mentioned, out of curiosity, I installed a rolling release Manjaro into a VM. But it ended up as a rarely used tool, only fired up to perform a specific task. Therefore, I never bothered much with updates. That was 100% my mistake. At the end, this installation was stuck in a deathloop of an unsupported kernel, outdated package sources and an incomplete keyring to validate new package signatures. (Someone more experienced with Arch could surely have salvaged the situation. But I didn't care that much and just nuked the VM.)
Ubuntu:
I found out that Ubuntu moves old releases / repositories into an archive. You can still access them but have to edit your system's sources list manually.
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/
But consider staying on LTS releases if you have difficulties with the quicker release cycle of interim releases.
EverNightX: I do not believe (at least in the case of Arch) you can request an update to particular point in time.
(...)
Not an Arch expert. But I found this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive quoting:
The Arch Linux Archive (a.k.a ALA), formerly known as Arch Linux Rollback Machine (a.k.a ARM), stores official repositories snapshots, iso images and bootstrap tarballs across time.
You can use it to:
- Downgrade to a previous version of one package (last version is broken, I want the previous one)
- Restore all your packages at a precise moment (my system is broken, I want to go back 2 months ago)
- Find a previous version of an ISO image
Packages are only kept for a few years, afterwards they are moved to the Arch Linux Historical Archive on archive.org.