To add to what others have said, a benefit of this type of distro is you can always go to a specific point in time of your configuration and packages. So if it

To add to what others have said, a benefit of this type of distro is you can always go to a specific point in time of your configuration and packages. So if it has worked, it will continue to work, while you can upgrade or change other parts in a separable manner. In a more interesting note, I wrote an aside about grafts, which are a way of providing changes to packages without rebuilding (often to graft in a security fix to a library the package uses). So you can keep a configuration of packages you like and graft on security fixes while staying on the same version. There are some caveats about when you can do this of course (ABI compatibility mainly), but is some cool technology, to me.