Repetition is bad. That's what Western culture tells us.
Repetition is mindless, it says.
But how do you get good at something? How do you achieve mastery?
Knowing what you're doing is important. You can read 100 books about how to play the violin. There are violin methods going back hundreds of years. While you're at it, why not read one of the many books on how to build a violin. That will help you soak up the essence of the violin.
If you read a couple dozen violin books on building and playing them, you'll know a lot about the violin. How they're made, how they're tuned, how they're played.
But eventually you need to get your hands on a fiddle, put it under your chin and start sawing away with a horsehair bow. The instruction of a good teacher will help. It's probably mandatory.
Then you need to get good.
How do you do that? There's really only one way:
You do that thing.
Many, many, many times. Every day. For as long as it takes. Understanding and knowledge are important, but doing well means in large part doing often.
We are told mastery is good. How do you arrive at mastery?
In Western culture, it's better when that mastery is the result more of pure genius and less relentless, repetitious toil. It makes for a better story.
But even geniuses need to practice.
When I saw violinist Joshua Bell lead the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields as both conducter and concertmaster, playing the violin with speed, fluidity and ease, it looks like the most natural thing in the world. It seems effortless.
Yet he didn't get there without many thousands of hours of practice and performance over decades.
Scales, exercises, etudes, studies. And more of the same. Every day. Year after year.
Without constant repetition, Joshua Bell the virtuoso could never happen.
I don't necessarily want to compare mastering the violin with washing dishes, sweeping the floor, and setting up and maintaining a Linux system.
But I could do that. And I will.
The secret to mastery is embracing the toil, the repetition, the practice.
Running sudo apt update
and then sudo apt upgrade
won't get you to Carnegie Hall (except maybe to the venue's IT department).
But you'll have a fully patched Debian system that's ready to run.
And keeping the system up to date goes the same way most times:
steven@steven-debian:~$ sudo apt update
[sudo] password for steven:
Hit:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates InRelease
Hit:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates InRelease
Hit:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.
steven@steven-debian:~$
If there were any packages that needed updating, the next command would be:
steven@steven-debian:~$ sudo apt upgrade
And that's about it during the life of a Debian Stable release.
On my current Debian laptop, I do this check every day, usually in the morning. There are never too many updates because it's Debian Stable. I could run an update/upgrade once a week, or even once a month.
Weekly is better. I like to think of running an update/upgrade daily as something you do.
Many days there are no updates. Sometimes you have two or three. On a day when Firefox updates, there are so many language packages that you could have 50.
Keep an eye on http://debian.org/security. There you can see all of the updates that the Debian Security Team has sent through the repositories to keep your system running as securely as possible. Sometimes there are even bug fixes, though the whole point of Debian Stable (that being stability) means that security patches are king and software "improvements" wait for the next release.