like not doing anything, just a spare laptop in case i ever need one, what if i use it years after i installed debian on it?? i would have to update like 300 packages and would take a lot??
debian? No. BSD? Maybe.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that - Debian and FreeBSD releases have roughly the same support lifespan, meaning if installed on release day, you’d get a few (~5 years) years of support without major upgrades.
I’d say both systems have a high chance of success at upgrading to the immediate next version, so that becomes maybe 7 or 8 years when adding the years of support left on the now older immediate next version.
For a second immediate next upgrade, you might be right that a BSD has a better chance of surviving.
I wouldn’t know about Open SD, though, as they operate on point releases and I don’t know to what extent they prevent breaking changes.
The thing is… The upgrade path degrades. Once one is 3 or more major versions behind, upgrading becomes technically challenging. (I have done this a few times…) It is better to just reinstall.
That said, a Debian system that works won’t just stop working. My Raspberry Pi 2 has no issues since the initial install.
Professionally, it is better to have a fast recovery path. PXE boot, Debian preseed, a config management system (Ansible, Puppet, etc) and local caches and you can be set in 10 minutes. (After years of setting all of that up.)
I had laptop running Ubuntu 16.04, which was running for 2273 days without reboots or anything. It was located in safe place so not even security updates were installed during that time. And it was still completely fine after all these days (little bit over 6 years). It was finally shut down when there was electricity break, and its battery failed, and I decided that it was time to retire it.
There of course were tons of updates available then, but no one forces you to install them. and in Debian system instead of Ubuntu, there will be lot less, their release policy is much stricter.
You are not forced to update it.
it is absolutely recommended to keep any system that has access to the internet up to date. i don’t know why people keep saying it isn’t
even if you did, stable shouldn’t break itself regardless of how far out-of-date it is, nor will it upgrade to the next release without a little bit of hoop jumping first.
No, it won’t force you to update to use it, you should if you’re going on the internet, but otherwise it’ll just work.
