like not doing anything, just a spare laptop in case i ever need one, what if i use it years after i installed debian on it?? i would have to update like 300 packages and would take a lot??
You are not forced to update it.
even if you did, stable shouldn’t break itself regardless of how far out-of-date it is, nor will it upgrade to the next release without a little bit of hoop jumping first.
sometimes you think you are old, and then you find out you are oldold and things are a little harder than you realized.
it is absolutely recommended to keep any system that has access to the internet up to date. i don’t know why people keep saying it isn’t
Someone said you shouldn’t?
No, it’s not allowed. The police are already on the way for thought crimes against updating.
The thing is… The upgrade path degrades. Once one is 3 or more major versions behind, upgrading becomes technically challenging. (I have done this a few times…) It is better to just reinstall.
That said, a Debian system that works won’t just stop working. My Raspberry Pi 2 has no issues since the initial install.
Professionally, it is better to have a fast recovery path. PXE boot, Debian preseed, a config management system (Ansible, Puppet, etc) and local caches and you can be set in 10 minutes. (After years of setting all of that up.)
My record is 4 years without update. I had to upgrade every version instead of jumping directly to the latest because I read this is how it is done.
This worked for Debian flawlessly. Another Laptop with Arch Linux died after updating a 2 years old system.
Yeah, but it’s a well known, well hidden fact, that Arch users are the beta testers of packages before real distros includes them…
We don’t actually use Arch, it’s a testing environment.
But we need those testers you know… So…
GO ARCH GO best distro evar!!
Hehe…
