I've avoided installing updates on my Linux installation for too long and now I'm afraid of clicking on the "Install Updates Now" button.

Help.

Do it. Worst case you brick your system if you messed with manual packages too much in the past. Then again, better bricked system than insecure system

Ah, a windows user!

This isn't Windows. I've update 2 year old setups before without problems.

But if you're wotried, back up your /home directory to a separate drive and worst case you have all your files.

@SoldierOfCode yeah i update my setups maybe every few months and the worst thing that happened, was some repo got changed, and the old one didn't work anymore.
But a few changes in some file later and everything works perfectly fine again.

you only have to worry if you

- tampered with kernel modules for critical features (only the specific feature is likely to be affected in case the modules break)
- are running X11 and changed your config
- have a very unusual file system setup
- are running Wayland with a DE that only recently started supporting Wayland at the time of your last update

Linuces are diverse so freak accidents happen, but these days most things really do tend to Just Work unless you're diverging from all popular setups.

+1: if for some reason you still haven't switched to PipeWire there's a possibility that this update will transition from PulseAudio to PipeWire. In my experience this switch only ever fixes bugs, but you may need to uninstall jack and install pw-jack

@lorentz
As a filthy Ubuntu user i honestly never had any problems updating.

@lorentz i never had audio problems with pulseaudio + ALSA funnily enough.
And i'm running one 18i20 scarlett focusrite for the whole apartment 👌

Built a little script that fetches input from an always connected MIDI Controller and controlls the mixing matrix of the audio controller, including the LEDs on the mixer. It's so fucking neat.

@thebiochemic Pulse + ALSA is fine, especially if you have the time and knowhow to script them properly, Pulse works correctly if allowed to own the system. It's just kind of clunky and slow. Jack + Pulse is where things start going rapidly downhill.

@thebiochemic I've seen many audio setups work well in expert hands, I'm pretty sure anything is possible if you know how to build it. Everything I said applies to defaults with copy-pasted amateur tweaking, which is what I and I suspect the majority of users do.

@lorentz yeah i guess thats fair enough