Let me guess: your running Ubuntu. I say that because of your reference to "dist-upgrade". On Ubuntu that happens every 6 months. For Debian it's more like 2

Let me guess: your running Ubuntu. I say that because of your reference to "dist-upgrade". On Ubuntu that happens every 6 months. For Debian it's more like 2 years. Ubuntu is of course mostly Debian, just released 4 times faster. So it runs runs the latest shiny and but has 4 times less testing. It shows in the ways you would expect. For what it's worth, we are moving to Debian from Windows on our most common install for very similar reasons you say you are ditching Linux: we are sick of things like WiFi drivers dropping out, the latest buggy Chrome being automagically installed. Well that and these are low end laptops, and Windows is very slow, occasionally taking second to response to a click on the start button (or whatever it's called now). Lxde is always instantaneous. Oh, and why do you expect OpenVPN to be different on the mac?