This series of posts highlights one of the features of Debian that's occasionally handy: you can usually upgrade between major stable releases in an automated way.
It can be good for workstation laptops, and for pets-not-cattle servers.
Stability for a couple years, then in-place upgrade to newer versions of things all at once. Whenever the timing is good for you (because you can keep using `oldstable` for a long time, with security updates).
Whether this upgrading incrementally keeps working smoothly for decades, I haven't read all of OP's posts to find out. But I've had machines running well after a few major upgrades, and even moving the HDD/SSD between upgraded laptop hardware.
I was really impressed that the author was able to upgrade from i686 to PAE to AMD64, all on the same Debian install. The crossgrade tool for the latter is particularly impressive.
Also, I must be getting old, because in my mind systemd and Gnome 3 are still fresh controversies, not part of a “remember when” retrospective.
> Also, I must be getting old, because in my mind systemd and Gnome 3 are still fresh controversies, not part of a “remember when” retrospective.
Yup! :-) In Debian, it was a decade ago (10 and 12 years respectively, in Jessie and Wheezy).
So you remember when /usr used to not be merged? Joking.
Friend, I remember doing horrible things to my config files to get XFree86 working. My first distro was Red Hat (not RHEL) 5. The /usr merge was last week.
Some documentation about that on the Debian wiki:
https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedUpgrade
It's relatively deterministic too, I've used that combined with apt-offline to upgrade offline servers successfully.
I have a debian box I installed in 2002. Trust me, it works :-)