Rocky's docs are also really nice. They aren't as thorough as RedHat's, but they're much more readable and concise, and tend to be written for a less enterprise-y audience.

Thanks!

I don't care much about being fully RHEL compatible, or no ABI changes at all. I just want a system that gets security fixes quickly with as little chances of breaking things as possible.

It usually doesn't live until the end of the support cycle. And if it does I will probably migrate it to a fresh VM instead of upgrading the distribution.

I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now.

It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.

I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers).

But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages.

But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release.

ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

> The question is...why do you care that much?

Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upgrade everything every 6-12 months it would eat up a significant amount of time for our small team.

> why do you care that much?

I've had issues with Ubuntu/Debian upgrades more than once. Some third party binaries breaking with the update. Or some specific config tweaks that break, because the structure of /etc changed too much.

For some small VM with a specific purpose I prefer a distribution that changes as little as possible for as long as possible. Less work, more uptime.

Ive had nothing but issues doing that. I think I’ve had a Debian upgrade actually succeed maybe one time? (After some manual intervention to fix some issue other booting on my work server)

For updates, Debian and Ubuntu are great. For upgrades… not so much for me.

I had unattended-upgrades cripple our VMs

I need to enable automatic updates, because I don't have the time to manually update. I have a few machines on Open SuSE Tubleweed, and stuff just randomly breaks. A few months ago there was a weird Kernel bug that just froze all of them. They update and reboot every day, and suddenly it all worked well again. A bit too exciting for me :)