Hiya,

I’ve been meaning to switch off of Debian for a while but I’m intimidated by fear of having a worse experience and my only PC (work and personal) being out of action until I get it sorted. Maybe the time has come to take my current distro behind the woodshed.

I updated from Debian 12 to 13 yesterday, following the instructions here: https://www.linuxlookup.com/howto/upgrade_debian_12_debian_13

The last step fails, and I assume that’s why I’m now in trouble.

$ sudo apt modernize-sources
E: Invalid operation modernize-sources

Searching for “Invalid operation modernize-sources” gives me literally zero results from DDG.

After reboot I opened KDE Discover and checked for updates - there are 2,000+. Yeesh. OK. I haven’t found one that will actually update, presumably because the sources are wrong? I get different errors.

For example, updating the Clock (I can’t believe the clock needs updating) auto-selects some other packages, I assume dependencies. Many minutes later I get the error:

The PackageKit daemon has crashed:
The PackageKit daemon has crashed

Firefox doesn’t select any other options, but fails quickly with:

Dependency resolution failed:<br/><br/>The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libreoffice-core: Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0 (&gt;= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-base but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-good but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-libav but it is not going to be installed

Is this worth fixing? Is it a sign to finally kill my Debian and try something new?

A kind lemming suggested Nixos and was persuasive, but my reading indicates that’s more for sysadmins deploying systems than for a bearded guy in his home office with one PC.

I just want my computer to work…