What? To upgrade Debian (the archetypical stable distro) to a new release, you just do an "apt dist-upgrade": https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade https://wiki

What? To upgrade Debian (the archetypical stable distro) to a new release, you just do an "apt dist-upgrade": https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade Minor patches to the Debian kernel are released all the time and you get those with a regular "apt upgrade". With Arch and other rolling-release distros, you get major new kernel versions all the time as part of the normal package upgrade flow.