I saw someone on ml point out that update should come before upgrade

Sauce

update pulls the metadata about your packages (to see if there are new versions, and which), while upgrade applies the patches.

I've never understood why the update part isn't included in the upgrade command, since upgrade is useless without it

Isn't that just topgrade

I'm honestly not sure. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/desktop/shared/usr/share/ublue-os/just/10-update.just

The bazzite motd says use ujust

You don't even have to use the aur are to have breaking changes. Most recently they changed how vlc was packaged. And broke it causing a lot of problems for users.

That's pretty rare. I ran arch for years and my only issues were from AUR or trying to update extremely out of date machines.

Especially because there is no way to limit the packages installed from a PPA AFAIK. If the PPA has a "new" version of NGINX, or of libc, or of Wayland - you get it, too!!!

Absolutely. Ideally you should have zero PPAs. There’s definitely a cost for using this feature. Most commonly it comes in the form of instability when you end up with incompatible or broken packages because the maintainer wasn’t playing an active enough role. YMMV!

I've run arch for years as well. It happens nearly yearly. I've had updates break completely several times. Partial updates. That required significant manual intervention. Etc Etc Etc. Meanwhile my Debian and fedora systems haven't had a hitch in years.

You can set packages from a particular repo to a lower priority so that they are only installed when you expressly ask for them

How does one do that, Wise Zorro?

I've moved on to gentoo. All the customization and if something breaks I can be sure it's my fault.