I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?
Never happened to me in 20+ years… I seriously wonder what some of y’all have been doing that this is a major concern.
I’ve had bad tinkering break my system before, but never had an update break it irreversibly. The closest would actually be on Silverblue itself, when an update to the kernel was using different signing keys that cause the system not to boot. Fortunately it was simple, I selected the previous deployment and I was in (on a non versioned OS I would have selected the previous kernel which most are configured to retain the last few). A quick Google revealed Ublue had a whole kerfuffle and after verifying it was legit, I enrolled the new certs into my MOK.
Although one time on Arch I had installed an experimental version of Gnome from one of their repos, and was pleasantly surprised when that version finally released and I removed the experiment repo and did an update absolutely nothing at all broke. Nothing.
Not irreversibly, but it’s annoying to be forced to spend an hour searching for an answer in forums then fixing to get networking or GUI back before you can do productive work.
I’ve done the horrible deed of updating Debian, for example.
Distros like Arch get a pass, but Debian screwed me over several times. For example a few years ago, some driver decided to make itself clinge onto old kernel versions. So the boot partition got full and left me in a weird start where I had to manually remove old kernels and track down the driver at fault.
Recoverable, but annoying, and on a system I use for work it would be really really expensive.
Fedora used to nuke itself sometimes if you upgraded an install from version n to n+1, n+2, … Like a config not being migrated properly, a package conflict because of renamed packages and versions, yada yada yada.
If you didn’t experience that, you either were very lucky, only used enterprise distros, or simply reinstalled often enough for it not to be an issue.