hckrnws

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.

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 also started with 3.1 as my very first linux experience. I never felt the need to change distro over the years. Just yesterday I upgraded 3 servers to debian 13, one from debian 11 and one from 12.

I wish I had more stories to tell, but that’s the thing I like about Debian.

I’m personally really happy people are interested enough to both try installing old operating systems using old hardware and blog about it!

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