It’s how I was in my first few years of Linux too. I think I started reading to understand what’s happening around Ubuntu 10.04. These days nothing scares me. I had a power failure during a 20.04 -> 22.04 upgrade. Shrugged, finished the upgrade procedure manually once the power came on. That particular machine hasn’t been nuked and paved since 14.04 or 16.04. Once you’re confident in what the system does, e.g. what apt and dpkg do, you can use them to do a lot. E.g. you can use dpkg to verify that all installed files for all packages exist and are indeed uncorrupted. Or compare a modified config file to the package one. And so on. I literally did a system file integrity check with dpkg on my corpo workstation the other day, after its SSD decided to disconnect from the system while it was running.
It’s how I was in my first few years of Linux too. I think I started reading to understand what’s happening around Ubuntu 10.04. These days nothing scares me. I had a power failure during a 20.04 -> 22.04 upgrade. Shrugged, finished the upgrade procedure manually once the power came on. That particular machine hasn’t been nuked and paved since 14.04 or 16.04. Once you’re confident in what the system does, e.g. what apt and dpkg do, you can use them to do a lot. E.g. you can use dpkg to verify that all installed files for all packages exist and are indeed uncorrupted. Or compare a modified config file to the package one. And so on. I literally did a system file integrity check with dpkg on my corpo workstation the other day, after its SSD decided to disconnect from the system while it was running.