FWIW, in almost all cases the only downside of using "apt upgrade" is that it might not upgrade all of our packages. we try hard to encode every interdependency on the package level, so usually this only means you run a less-well-tested and/or outdated combination of versions. of course it can happen that we miss adding such a dependency edge, in which case stuff might break as a result of a version mismatch somewhere. the symptoms here in this thread seem to have another cause though - although I am not sure which one exactly. replicating the behaviour on a test system while writing down the steps to arrive at it would probably help in finding out.