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FWIW, I once abandoned an Ubuntu server for a decade, and managed to update it painlessly in 20 minutes. That same server is still running today, now with the latest LTS. I think I might have even started with Ubuntu 4, or perhaps 6, and it has been painless all the way through. Perhaps my slow upgrades saved me from early adopter woes :).

I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable feels like an absolute jewel, even if there are always a few packages I need to handle separately because I want or need a more updated version. But I love the old school no-nonsense engineering ethos.

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I have a machine that's on a Debian installation that I've been steadily upgrading, one Debian stable release at a time, since I originally installed it about a decade ago now. At one point I even copied the entire installation to another disk (just a "dd" from its original SATA SSD to a new NVMe one, plus some partition and filesystem resizing), and I've upgraded the CPU/motherboard/RAM at another time, and it just keeps going reliably. It's fun knowing that the origin of that Debian installation predates every hardware component it's presently running on (with the exception of only the case and power supply).
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> However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation...

You've been misled.

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> something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update

That's mostly problem of Arch/Artix, they're the bleeding edge, which is not always the best for stability. But no one said that rolling distro is supposed to always ship latest versions of everything. I've been using Void Linux past months - and while it's a rolling distro, it runs LTS kernel (mainline is also available) and maintainers are more focused on stable versions of apps than on faster updates.

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My servers/VMs typically run either FreeBSD or Alpine. A Debian here or there where needed (proxmox, VPS that doesn't support Alpine, corp stuff, etc).

I've also got a couple of test systems running Chimera - going to wait until it hits stable before relying on it too much though. Experimenting a bit with AerynOS too.

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I hope FreeBSD has longer supporting cycle. Its release has a supporting life of less than one year, if missing the upgrade window, then later upgrade is more difficult than others such as debian stable.
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