I understand why you might want to refresh your package cache independently of performing an update.
But why does Apt effectively force you to do two commands just to update?
If my package cache is three weeks old then I'm going to need to do an update before an upgrade, because otherwise packages aren't there. So an update on its own is pointless. It's just going to try and update to non-existent packages.
Yum, DNF and Zypper all have the sense to fetch the latest package list.
Before moving to debian stable, I was long accustomed to systems which sometimes pushed updates which for my purposes seemed better left for others to try first. So for me it's still three steps rather than two: Update the package index, decide which ones to install, and then do the upgrade.
@kbal As I'm on an LTS release and it's a hobby server then I'm in the "update everything because bug fixes and security patches are good and I'm sure it'll be fine" camp.
On my desktop, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed, so it's a rolling distro and I take whatever's there. But then I've got Btrfs with snapshots if something does break (which is very rare - even NVidia drivers have been playing nice with kernel changes recently!)
@selea I think it does that. I've got a script that emails available updates, but then they're not always there when I go to install them. But sometimes they are there days later, so it doesn't seem to install everything itself. Plus services need restarting.
Since moving from a CentOS VPS to a professionally hosted Ubuntu Raspberry Pi Ubuntu, I've had multiple stuck processes, detached shells and crashed processes that may line up with updates. Unattended… has issues.
Unattended-upgrades just installs certain updates, such as security updates only that does not require manual intervention (like modofied config files etc).
Personally, I've never had those problems (managed thousands of servers).
Does the RPI have a SD-card as a storage?
Do you have third party repos?
@selea No, it's NFS storage and PXE boot to avoid SD card failure issues and recover quickly if the hardware fails.
I've got one third-party repo, but it's just my Open Build Service repo with one package in it (mod_cspnonce).
I've had no end of annoyances since moving to Ubuntu. And I was never keen on it when it was our desktop at work a decade ago. RPM and SELinux just makes so much more sense to me and has fewer problems than Deb and AppArmour/nothing.