On 2024-05-28 Adam Thompson wrote:
I consistently say the same thing to everyone: no computer or OS today is good for more than 5 years. The entire industry is pushing us onto that treadmill, and you only get >5yrs through... well, basically, luck.
OS ya... but on hardware, I'm not sure what it is you're buying if you think you have to get a new computer every 5 years! Except for video work and gaming, every mid-range computer and better made in the last 15 years is perfectly capable of doing what most users need. (If it says i5 or i7, it's still usable with an SSD and decent RAM.)
Of course, I'm talking the Linux world... Windows forcing new requirements on people is a different story.
There are a few niche exceptions to this, but almost everything else available is aimed at either "enthusiasts" who enjoy constantly upgrading
I dislike upgrading, but I do find that more often than not I need the newest bells & whistles of at least one of the programs/daemons/kernel I use. Of course I am Fedora, so I'm forced into that cycle, but it has worked very well for me as I find the balance nearly optimal.
Personally I upgrade every 6 months to the oldest supported Fedora release. These days I'd say 75% of the upgrades are nothingburgers with basically nothing that affects me changing (read: low-risk upgrades). But sometimes some aspect of the system, whether kernel or php or another deamon, will have a drastic change, and can end up being buggy (or "buggy" for my use case). Those are the painful upgrades that do make a good case for an Ubuntu LTS...
My feeling on the subject is use the distro family that you know best. Having to work both in the Deb and RH world (and worse, add in SUSE) is a royal pain, as everything is in the "wrong" place. If you like the RH family and need LTS, considering Alma/Rocky or springing for $RHEL$.
If you're uncommitted or novice, I must admit the Deb world may be the more attractive one at the moment, mostly due to IBM royally screwing everything up. I hope it's at least $paying$ for them, otherwise what was the point?