Every week or two, or month, or two. ๐
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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every 7 days
Or if I hear about a security update.
That's what I'm doing as well, seems like a good compromise.
Infrequently (when I remember)
Whenever I'm bored and can't think of anything else to do
When I remember, or when something breaks
When I think of it. Every few days on average, sometimes weeks though.
I've blindly updated a year+ old Arch install without introducing problems. Not saying they don't ever happen, but it isn't that common.
Generally as I get a notification that packages are available. The exception is probably if there's a new kernel and I don't feel like rebooting.
I update Portage almost daily but do the actual package updating kind of every week - it depends on how many packages are (or how big they are) to be updated
Counter-question: how do linux releases roll?
twice or thrice a day. i have seen problems happening if you wait more than week (signatures not matching and stuff). Also I have a mostly automated setup (essentially sudo password read from password manager into std input of sudo -S sh -c "yes | pacman -Syu ", yes command will update the packages.) since i manually trigger it, if i know i do not have internet or not in a situation to deal with it in case something goes wrong (last happened more than 2 years ago), then i do not. I also see the command's output which lists all packages updated, so if there is something that requires reboot, i will reboot soon.
Every few days on the machines I use daily, but I have a couple spare laptops which I only use infrequently, and I usually don't run into any major problems when I have to make a big set of updates on a machine I am using for the first time in a few months.
Weekly, just before the weekend so if there is any problems I can spend my weekend looking into it
Every day (NixOS unstable)
Every week or so
Every day by cronjob.
Daily usually.
Once a week
Once a week and only when I have time to potentially fix something that breaks. Usually because of something I did. Nobody told me I'd have to deal with config file changes in etc. Pacnew in my case. Had to discover that on my own.
Using diff with meld makes it pretty simple. I missed a line in one file recently and SDDM stopped automatically starting on boot. Growing pains. Plus I threw myself in the deep end to learn faster with a rolling release but that's just how I operate.
Part of me welcomes breakage because that's how I got gud at bending Windows to my will as a kid.
Exceptions of course if there's a new feature I want to try out ASAP.