I have been told that Automatix breaks things, but I did not experience breakage the few times I used it. Still, I am new to Ubuntu and if a long-time user tells me that something will cause breakage, I tend to believe them.

That said, I have seen what I consider to be bad advice coming out of some of the Ubuntu IRC channels. For example, I was more or less flamed because I enable root when I install a Linux distribution that has it disabled by default. It is very inconvenient for me to have the root account disabled. It's like someone telling to never use a knife. You just have to know which tool to use and when to use it. So if you feel comfortable using Automatix, go ahead and use it, keeping in mind that it might cause some breakage. I would not use it to update parts of my system that are essential to the system.

One thing that I wish someone would fix is the APT dialog that tells the user that certain packages are not needed and can be removed, but this has not been fixed and it broke my system three times when I first installed kubuntu. After the third time, I realized that saying YES to autoremoving packages is a bad thing.