Sure, if you stick to stock Debian repositories you should be fine. However this guarantee is gone if you're using proprietary kernel modules, like say nVidia d

Sure, if you stick to stock Debian repositories you should be fine. However this guarantee is gone if you're using proprietary kernel modules, like say nVidia drivers - which is not an uncommon scenario. Also, the /usr merge thing has caused some issues for users, requiring manual intervention[1]. Not a big deal for techy users familiar with the terminal, but this isn't something end users might want to deal with. Image based immutable distros don't have issues like this. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge