I now have 2 machines that are older than 13 years (one 2007, other 2010 install) and just dist-upgrade every 2 years. Ships of Theseus, both of them, everythin

I now have 2 machines that are older than 13 years (one 2007, other 2010 install) and just dist-upgrade every 2 years. Ships of Theseus, both of them, everything replaced at some point. Started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat 6 (NOT RHEL) that I got with some book, then Storm Linux that eventually got me into Debian. The thing worth nothing back then is that if you wanted to say, install a package with dependencies, you could do that in installer of Red Hat or Mandrake, but tools in the OS didn't allow for that, yum only happened in 2002. So the first shock with Debian derivative was that I could just tell it to install package and it will find the deps. And it could uninstall those deps too! And UPGRADE WORKED! After Mandrake/Red Hat it was like a miracle. I also liked the fact Debian kept it "as vanilla as possible while still playing nice with rest of the packages, instead of... whatever the fuck RHEL was doing (without exaggeration we thousands lines of code of fixes for stuff in RHEL5/6... that just went away when we moved to Debian as there it worked). Wonderful distro, can't recommend it enough, especially on servers, slap unattended-upgrades on it and can basically forget it's there.