Because:

1. If you install any new software that needs updating, you don’t need to update your alias.
2. If any software makes changes that break your alias, (theoretically) the bit of software should be able to fix it quickly, without you needing to pay any attention to it.
3. The bit of software can more easily do advanced things than the simple alias. For example, I added functionality to update JetBrains Toolbox and IDE’s installed with it. A simple alias could not do this, because Toolbox does not have a simple update command, however I made it work by enabling automatic updates temporarily, and then inspecting the log for updates. Now the end-user doesn’t have to think about this at all. Other things that could be done but are not implemented yet include parallelization, and listing updated components in a neat summary (PR linked).

Of course if you’re a minimalist, then you probably don’t have that much stuff that needs upgrading in the first place. For me personally I have deb-get, uv, cargo, and flatpak, to name a few; the alias was getting longer and longer until I was able to remove it completely by switching to Topgrade.

Can I introduce you to Topgrade? ;)

I love the feeling of just forking something to add your wild tiny feature. I forked LeechBlockNG to notify my friend when I pressed “Override” :)

Or finding a tiny bug in some software, then spending multiple hours learning their codebase so you can fix it. And then building and using your fork because they’re too slow with merging it…

Using open source software + having enough experience and confidence to figure out most things (given enough time, of course) software-related is so empowering.