Sorry, forget to mention in my wall of text that I usually funroll loops on my desktop systems. Mea culpa 
If I understood the bug report I linked, and what was said in the video, correctly, Linusā system broke during an upgrade, which cannot be rolled back, not by apt, nor by Nala (since itās just apt under the hood)
It was a mistake for Linus to use anything but NixOS. lmao
Iāve kept going back to apt because you see whatās happening when things go wrong. If something is doing multiple things in parallel and some are failing thereās a mess.
So, how well does nala work when things go wrong? Failing repos and conflicts come to mind.
I use aptitude most days to replace apt list --upgradable:
aptitude -F '%12p %t %V %d' search '~U'
to get a description of the packages. Otherwise, to fix stuff that apt chokes on, a few times a decade.
Iāll check out if nala can be tweaked to give package descriptions.
@jlittle while your looking if nala can be tweaked to give package desscriptions, could you see if a command option could be add to make sure some packages will be left alone when you run sudo nala upgrade. I look at the man page for nala and I couldnāt find one. This is my only gripe with nala.
Been running Debian Testing here for ten years or something. I ran one of those āfind the fastest mirrorā once but these days I only use the country url (Index of /debian) Itās fast enough for me. Also, Iām running aptitude. Not sure if it still true but earlier aptitude were better at finding alternatives for pinned packages.
The nala list --upgradable does give the description, but uses four lines for each package, with the description on the third. A lot more wordy than Iām used to, but can be piped through a simple clean up script.
lol if i could keep kali working for more than a month i might consider thisā¦
but iāve killed it 7 times this year alone 
for now it would just be another thing i would have to re-install 
Kali is not meant to be a rolling distribution that is used for daily
Itās full of terrible practices such as keeping a root user active and many other things arenāt as secure as they should be because itās designed for one thing, penetration testing and offensive attacks. Thatās really it
I highly suggest you donāt run it as a daily. However again this is your choice. Every single tool in Kali Linux can be installed on pretty much any distribution. These tools are not hard to acquire and theyāre also not hard to build from source.
For example, I took every single tool that was on Kali Linux and built it for tails. That was my pen testing and is my pen testing distribution to this day.
Exactly. Zypper is the only package manage/system manager (that I know of) which takes actual snapshots of the filesystem so when you boot, you can roll back to a previous snapshot or if you are in the OS and want to roll back, you can.
Did you look at he first option at man nala-upgrade is --exclude
My first use of nala tripped on a held package, and the output was ok.
No, all I did was type man nala and read whatever came up. I have looked at the rest of the available options for nala, and I am satisfied now. Thanks, @Jlittle.
I donāt get the slow mirror point, Iāve never really had a problem with mirrors being slow? Even if they are āslowā, packages are so small it doesnāt really matter
Most new Debian users got a preset mirror in the U.S. or so. While not living in the U.S.
That said, donāt use the default, change it to something more local!
As for small packages, try doing a full upgrade on unstable after being away for a weekā¦ on a 2 MB connection. 
This. I use Software Center.
Please help.
Hey, welcome!
I have spent time delving into apt broken symlinks and tracing what file is needed to build, but instead I use flatpak and install stuff like python with apt.
Hmm, I never looked at what the default was, maybe Iāve been pulling stuff across the Atlantic all this timeā¦ Welp.
But is doing parallel downloads going to help then?
Those of you having problem with apt, what distro are you on? Iāve been running Debian testing for about ten years and the only problem Iāve had has been when once in a blue moon a dependency isnāt updated at the same time or a package has changed and the program depending on it hasnāt been updated. Like when the default changed from something to OpenSSL or similar.