Comment by PunchyHamster a day ago
It's such a stark contrast, my home servers just run unattended-upgrade (on Debian) with no problems, I just do the major version upgrade every year.
Meanwhile everything consumer and most enterprise is as you said, "don't upgrade if it is not broken, else you WILL feel pain".
Companies basically trained bad security habits into their user base
If hardware is failing fair enough. If you can't restore bare-metal within two hours then you're doing something wrong.
It is equally great as a workstation when combined with a development environment manager with package installation like devenv or flox (or many other options). This combo gives you a stable (not-changing) platform with up-to-date tooling. Best of both worlds.
Do you do the major version upgrade the minute it's announced? Be honest.
The point is that you don't have to: the unattended-upgrades part is separate from the major upgrades. You still get security updates for the previous stable release for a while after a new stable release, and the security updates can safely be installed the minute they're announced without bringing in unwanted features changes.
debian stable? Yes. Debian stable is tested to the point that it's fossilized. Besides, we're not even talking about a major version update. We're talking a minor one, and the last time I'd had a simple update break linux was when arch was shipping the master branch of grub. (The dev and I had words over this practice, which resulted in me going to another distro)
On my home server, sometimes I do take some snapshots and upgrade a few VMs and LXC containers.
Sometimes I even run testing because stable will be out shortly and I don't feel like upgrading.
It's a very different experience to the single Windows laptop in my house, where the latest stable is always subtly broken in ways I notice. Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening, for example.
He did say Debian, being stable is the one thing it's good at.
I admin a bunch of Ubuntu servers and I tend to do a major version upgrade on my laptop and then some low priority machines to see if anything has changed. Typically, the only issues I've had is when there's dropped support for older SSH/SSL protocols which is easily fixed.
However, Windows Update isn't doing a major version upgrade as far as I know - it's the equivalent of doing a kernel upgrade in Linux. Also, the typical Linux upgrade command will also pull in updates/fixes for pretty much every bit of software in the system, whereas Windows Update will ignore user installed software as far as I know.
Yeah Debian is really stable because its so far behind the current releases, lots of testing has been done by the time it updates a package. Great for servers and stuff you just want to set and forget with auto updates.