Hell, I run Arch Linux on a number of laptops and workstations, and the only time I've had a kernel upgrade break anything was the wifi on my wife's old netbook

Hell, I run Arch Linux on a number of laptops and workstations, and the only time I've had a kernel upgrade break anything was the wifi on my wife's old netbook some time around 3.12, and that was Broadcom's fault. So I downgraded to 3.11 (didn't even need network access for that), and a few months later on 3.14 it was working again. Most of the upgrade pain I've had has been caused either by the migration to systemd or by the decision to unify /usr/bin, /bin, /usr/sbin and /sbin into one folder.