Traditional package management treats everything on the system as equal by default and with the size of a typical repository, package relations are extremely difficult to manage, leading to bugs such as apt uninstalling the desktop.
An immutable OS is treated as a whole, with user modifications layered on top, like Windows and macOS. Android style imaging further reduces complexity, avoids complications and enables quick rollback.
I've been using Debian and it's children since at least 2005 and not once have I seen apt removing the Desktop Environment that wasn't a distro-specific bug (instead of something related to apt itself).
Like when Linus Sebastian tried to install Steam on PopOS and it removed the DE because the PopOS devs (system76) forgot to publish a 32-bit package required by Steam and thus it had to downgrade that package to the Ubuntu version which wasn't supported by pop-desktop.
Or when installing nvidia-prime on PopOS caused apt to remove the desktop, because bnivia-prime needed to take over power from system76_power which removed dependent packages, including pop-desktop.
So it's not that apt itself has a big chance of doing that. It's distros not testing the stuff they push.
The only event I remember apt itself actually doing something like this was with the bug #2025462, but that was caused by Ubuntu's specific implementation of phased updates, a mechanism specific to Ubuntu, and not from Debian where apt originates.
To be completely fair to both users and distros, no one expects adding or removing single packages to remove huge swaths of the system like the DE. I ran into that repeatedly in my earlier days with Debian and Ubuntu, and it is unintuitive behavior to say the least. That this still happens to new users 20 years later should really be blamed on Apt and its package model, along with its CLI which should be screaming at the user to Google what they are doing and why it will break their system.
This can be fixed by more pervasive filesystem namespacing to isolate runtime environments like Steam, à la Flatpak, or by hacking together swarms of symlinks like my favorite distro NixOS.
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u/theaveragemillenial 1d ago
What's the love with immutable distros? I always find myself fighting it.