In fairness, that's not an issue with the OS - you can maintain a single install for a long time (see other comments in this thread running a continuous Arch sy

In fairness, that's not an issue with the OS - you can maintain a single install for a long time (see other comments in this thread running a continuous Arch system for over a decade), but equally nothing prevents you from accumulating mutations until it's easier to reinstall the whole thing, and Arch is probably more popular with folks who are inclined to tinker:) And to be clear, I say that without judgement - I've gotten better at not messing up my system over time, and for that matter knowing when something is likely to break things and so test in a VM or whatever, but a lot of my knowledge of how things work comes from having done terrible things to poor innocent machines. Of course, I've always been an incorrigible distro-hopper, so I always just took that as part of the lifecycle: Install shiny new OS, kick the tires, use it for a while, slowly accumulate hacks until the thing is slightly broken, then wipe and install the new shiny OS. It's just that after enough years, it takes longer and longer for it to get slightly broken:)