I used Debian on my home PC/laptop/PC from potato (2000ish), then testing, upto about 2008, but moved to Ubuntu LTS in 2008 for hardware purposes. On my desktop

I used Debian on my home PC/laptop/PC from potato (2000ish), then testing, upto about 2008, but moved to Ubuntu LTS in 2008 for hardware purposes. On my desktop ran 08, then rebuilt to 12, then rebuilt to 16. Last night I tried doing an upgrade from 16 to 20 (via 18). Took about an hour to go through both. A couple of niggles so far 1) nvidea drivers broke, had to install the latest version with apt 2) Sound wasn't working from user accounts, pulseaudio complaining about unable to access the files. lsof showed timidity had snd files open too, and removing that seemed to do the job 3) clusterssh reported a perl issue - for some reason I had a ~/perl5 folder in my home directory vlc looks weird now too, but overall not too bad, and will last another 4 years. Not sure if this desktop will last beyond 2024 - it's a 2015 HP Z440 with a Quadro K2200 graphics card. Over time I've seen bad things with ubuntu -- changing networking, breaking logging by forcing systemd, etc. Ultimately though you can only delay change, but like Cnut, there's no much you can do about the incoming tide. Having breaking changes every 4 or 5 years is the price to be paid. Server wise we never upgrade, reboot, pxe boot, build the latest, then run the installation commands. Had various issues over the years with updating internal packages (apache 2.2 to 2.4 changes come to mind)