Thanks for taking the time to reply! dist-upgrades like you mention are where I would actually expect a little bit of that discomfort you mention. That's [if

Thanks for taking the time to reply! dist-upgrades like you mention are where I would actually expect a little bit of that discomfort you mention. That's [if memory serves] where the 'major' upgrades come in (eg: 8 -> 9) where we'd expect some surprises. I hold the somewhat controversial opinion that CentOS Stream should be fine for most people, as you'd generally be hard pressed to notice differences between minor revisions [outside of compliance/certification efforts] I think the smaller upgrades are especially painful on Apt/deb based distributions. Updates tend to require some attention, if nothing else to answer this question: "Keep the modified configs, or accept the vendor defaults?" Those based on RPM tend to handle that case a little bit better in my experience. If a config is modified it's trusted, but the vendor configs are available as '.rpmnew' files. This way, if you find a problem - you have a way to find yourself back to comfort. While Apt can be configured similarly, it doesn't come that way [as far as I'm aware, on the big representations - Debian/Ubuntu] I can't say for other families as I haven't had quite the experience managing fleets of those! None of this is to say it's a 'magic bullet' of sorts. Some discipline is certainly still rewarded! There's usually tiers of environments where you try it out with fairly low stakes [such as development/integration areas], then you work your way up the pipeline to upgrading the thing that matters. Another approach is to simply replace the old with new. Depending on the elasticity of the environment you may favor one over the other.