Argh, and I just deployed a Debian 10 system last week! Serves me right for not checking when the next release was due
. :D
Tried on 3 tests VM last month, nuked 1 out of them, failed somewhere mid process after removing half of the system packages. That machine never rebooted.
I must have upgraded at least 1000 times over 20 years and I've only had a machine become unbootable once
also: Debian and its derivitaves likely runs on more machines than Windows does
I've done it at home for multiple computers and it works. I don't do that sort of things at work however.
There are obvious limitations on the hardware if you really want to go all the way from XP (32 bits), don't expect it to take SSD or high core modern CPU.
P.S. Debian has order of magnitudes less desktops/servers than Windows. There's a tremendous amount of embedded devices on Debian but that's a completely different use case, if anything they never get an upgrade from the manufacturer.
Source for Debian running orders of magnitude fewer servers than Windows ?
TL;DC; 2018: 48% Windows 34% Red Hat 18% rest.
Again, servers are probably largely irrelevant for dist upgrade. On desktop the prevalence is clear.
how many "sales" of Debian are there?
Wikipedia has some stats with sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
There's about 300 millions Windows devices shipped a year for the past half decade. They must be mostly desktops, unless Windows mobile made a return that eluded everyone :D
Funny enough, for servers, both Windows and Linux (all distributions) have 27% market share.
And even if Debian runs on more machines than Windows (which I doubt), most of them are probably VMs, that have only a few apps installed, and just get rebuilt instead of being upgraded. Which means that fact is also irrelevant for dist upgrades.
I've also never had a Debian upgrade trash a filesystem entirely either, but have had that happen on a Windows 10 "upgrade", when it decided to overwrite the MS dynamic disk software RAID superblock with garbage
(not to mention the random registry corruptions that seemed to plague Windows installations in the not-too-distant past without even needing to do an upgradep)
Today I apt-get updated again and the same machine now reports it's on debian 11. It's pretty painless to be honest upgrading. Just follow the basic apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.
You know your systems better than I do though.