Comment by einsteinx2

This is very curious to me as someone who has used Debian based distros almost exclusively for essentially 20+ years (earlier on was mostly Ubuntu, now just vanilla Debian ever since the whole Snap situation) on all of my servers, VMs, containers, and various desktops. To my memory I’ve never had to fix a system due to a broken apt install, certainly not enough times to be so frustrated as to move to another distribution. On top of that, nowadays I have things configured so a new BTRFS snapshot is created on any apt install/upgrade commands so I can just rollback to the previous snapshot if I did run into any issues, which I haven’t ever needed to do. Though that seems to solve the same issue that rolling back in nix does?

I absolutely believe you’ve had this problem, but I’m struggling to understand the issue you’re describing. How exactly is an apt install breaking your whole system? I don’t even really understand how an apt install could break an entire system rather than just failing to install the package. Did you mean to say dist-upgrade or something? Are you using Debian or a downstream distribution? If Debian, are you running Sid or is this happening on unstable/stable? I’m just really curious about this situation.