I thought it worked for a little while, it certainly did update something, but I soon realized it still said buster and 10, not bullseye and 11. Maybe the pi400 needs me to do something slightly different than a regular raspberry pi 4.

i've always got lots of other things going on so i didn't try to address this until now, several months later.

This time i tried these somewhat similar instructions and of course right now i think they worked, but i'm going to let it finish up and this time i'll type lsb_release -a to check.

lol certainly looked and felt like it was upgrading, but after some intense rebooting i typed lsb_release -a and it still said 10 and buster, also said no lsb modules are available and said permission denied when i tried to type /etc/apt/sources.list. So I'm going backwards, now i lost permissions i had before. I might have to just flash the sd card with a new image. That's what I plan to do now.

It's several days later, 1/29/2023, i tried to update some stuff using the preferences menu and it completely failed and now the terminal doesn't even work. i think my original problem was something similar to the this link: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=331984. I think i have tried sudo apt dist-upgrade and sudo apt upgrade in the past though, and it didn't work either. I was going to try both again, but the terminal no longer works lol.

The terminal not even coming up is pretty bad, this is kind of what happens to me with linux in general, and has since i first tried a linux distro in i don't know, 1998?, it seems very unsafe to update or install anything, it seems like it has no system files like windows. Like in windows you can change system files by going into the registry and stuff, but you'll be very aware it's happening, it doesn't just randomly do that to you every time you install a game or install any little update. All I did was i pressed preferences, then add/remove software, then options, package sources, check for updates, install, and it of course failed to install something and completely broke the system and now the terminal's not working. Ok, maybe it was really stupid for me to do that, but it doesn't seem like i did anything all that wrong. If it was so stupid for me to click preferences then install updates through the gui, maybe that gui isn't very good, and maybe it shouldn't be there on the pi400 which is a pretty mainstream sort of thing, it's not supposed to be like arch. i remind you i tried the terminal first of course. Maybe they fixed it in bullseye too haha. Is there some way that everyone else knows that i don't where you can kind of protect critical files from being ruined every 5 seconds? I really like the idea of linux, i really hate lots of stuff about windows and microsoft, but linux will always be a toy/backup/secondary thing if i can't control/trust basic installations and updates. And yeah you can say i made a stupid mistake and discount my experience because i'm dumb, but i still had that experience, and i think i'm probably not alone, lots of normal people and dumb people(who experience things and know things that you don't, but that are just as real) probably tried linux at some point and had something like that happen to them and never tried it again, that's why linux has struggled unless if it's mac os or android or something like that which has been kind of locked down and changed for the public by a big company like apple or google. I'd like to find some sort of option in between those two, i bet there is one, i bet there's a(probably well known but unknown to me) linux tool that lets you stop certain files from being touched, but i bet it also blocks certain necessary updates from happening at all and you have to press y to override it all the time. So even that's not a great idea. I think it should be built into the os, what it is is hard to say, maybe it's like that in linux mint or some other distro that i haven't tried, and i guess it's a little like that in ubuntu which i have tried. There are probably people who know how to do this perfectly for themselves in arch or whatever. Maybe I should blame the pi400 or pi os 10 buster only and not either myself or all of linux. Oh well, the only choice i see now is to make a new image of the new os on the sd card. All I really wanted to update was the arduino ide, and that didn't seem possible without upgrading to bullseye, and that was something i decided a long time ago, so i don't remember why(a problem i'm trying to solve by making little journal entries like this one). I remember the arduino ide wasn't working, and that time i just used it on windows and it was fine. I kind of don't want to do that this time, so i'm going to flash the sd card.