Linux and BSD theory: 6-month upgrades offer a different kind of 'stability' than waiting 2, 3 or 5 years

12 July, 2025 - Categories: Linux, BSD - Tags: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenBSD

By Steven Rosenberg

I'm going to throw a theory out here based on my experience with Fedora (Workstation and Silverblue), Debian Stable and OpenBSD over many upgrade cycles:

Six-month upgrades lead to a more stable system than 2-, 3- or 5-year upgrades.

I think the reason is that the overall system doesn't have nearly as far to go when it is upgraded every 6 months. There are fewer changes at once and hence fewer things to go wrong. There is also less cruft between upgrades to potentially "mess up" when much newer software is introduced to a running system.

I've been running Fedora Silverblue from version 38 through 42, and OpenBSD from 7.3 to 7.7, and in both cases the 6-month upgrades have been quick and uneventful.

I've upgraded Debian from 10 through 12 on another machine, and every time I need to mess with the kernels and/or boot parameters to get the brightness adjustment to work. And now I'm having an issue with LibreOffice in Debian 12 where it won't open files I created in the LO Flatpak in Fedora 42.

I'm not saying that in-place Debian upgrades are nothing but problems. I've personally had a lot of success with running and upgrading Debian many, many times.

And as a point of order, I don't run much Ubuntu (or its derivatives), but I hear about a lot of issues when LTS systems are upgraded after years of service. And as a further point of order, Lubuntu is by far the best LXQt distro out there.

So there's a whole lot of anecdotal information here, and I'd love to hear what Ubuntu users who upgrade every 6 months think of this theory.

But more than what theoretically (or anecdotally) happens with Debian and Ubuntu LTS, it's the lack of drama I experience with the more-frequent releases of OpenBSD and Fedora leading me to the conclusion that 6-month releases have their own kind of stability that shouldn't be ignored.