What kind of stuff breaks? (not nit picking). I used to have that issue on old laptops. But I run linux on a PC now and it's been pretty much issue free. Maybe something with a major release update. But always curious about others experiences. I will say Windows updates break things as well, no experience with MacOS however.

I have an Ubuntu PC that runs both Mythtv and Kodi that I use as a HTPC.

Recently did an update from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, which completely broke lirc which is the program that runs the IR remote.

So my unhappy partner was unable to use the remote in kodi until I finally worked out how to fix it (and every aspect of how they broke it).

Looks like they just changed the way it works for no useful reason. I had to manually set up every IR button again because the remote name had changed from "mce" to "devinput-32". Why??

MythTV didn't work at all because for some reason the mysql bind address had changed so it couldn't access its own database.

Once I got that working, I discovered that the remote didn't work in mythtv either. They had changed the name of the ?file? they use to send button names. I had to make a symbolic link to the new name so the remote would work in MythTV. "sudo ln -s /run/lirc/lircd /dev/lircd". Why??

Also I had a button set up on the IR remote to shutdown kodi. That stopped working and took me more time to fix.

Kodi was also throwing some python errors, fixed by doing "sudo apt install python-backports.functools-lru-cache"

The Kodi database also got corrupted somehow, so some files weren't showing up until I deleted the database, which meant I lost the resume times on videos we were watching. I spent a fair bit of time googling and trying to fix the database but in the end, no matter what I did those files would not show if the database was active on my movies folder.

Also the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled, but I expected that because that breaks with every single update.

So yeah, that was about a week of evenings to get it working back the way it was.

Not the poster you're replying to, but I've had a few issues occasionally. Biggest one was an Xorg update that was done incorrectly by the maintainers. The X server itself was updated, but GLX components weren't, which led to some incompatibility between the two. Net result being that the screen was blank after boot. I've also had issues where the Ubuntu's apt repos would somehow get themselves into a locked up state where it errored out and refused to work; I don't remember what was the exact error, something to do with the upstream repos and the local cache, I just remember it was very difficult to recover; I think it might've required a reinstall of Ubuntu and I do remember it happening more then once.

Most of the other issues IIRC were annoyances more then anything else.

i sure wish all the popular distros would offer snapshot/rollback integration out of box, and thus if it happened you could just boot back into the working one, and move on until it gets fixed.

Do you mean upgrades between major versions of your distribution? Updating packages has (practically) never broken things for me, and I use Debian Testing. Before I started using a rolling release distribution, I found it easier to keep the system and my data separated on disk and just install a new distribution afresh whenever I want to install a new version.

Yes, major upgrade of Ubuntu version.

What distro(s) do you use?

Ubuntu. To be clear it's a major upgrade, ie 16.04 to 18.04. I've never had anything break with the usual upgrades.