There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.
It's entirely possible that BSD is more stable and lends itself better to running for really long times uninterrupted. But Linux systems running for years really aren't unheard of, and by no means is one year the top of the range.
Whether you should do that is another question. Over the course of a decade, there could well be even kernel-level vulnerabilities discovered, let alone ones in other services running on top of it. You might have a system running without a reboot for years as long as you make sure to update (and restart) user space services as needed. But leaving an entire server unattended for years doesn't sound like a good idea generally.
That may not be as much of a concern if what the box is running is a limited set of services or functionality with little exposed surface. But that then comes more down to "what you're doing with it" rather than "which OS you're using".
The generally less conservative development culture around Linux leans more towards moving fast and breaking things, although generally while trying to avoid the latter. Perhaps that makes things like low-level OS vulnerabilities or whether the system still restarts cleanly after a decade more important in the Linux land, and what counts as prudent administration in Linux might be less of a concern in BSD.
But if you can have a BSD box running for a decade, with some particular set of services, in an internal network(?), and then compare that to someone else's report of a Linux box running for (at least) a year, in 1994 or 1995, probably running an entirely different workload, in a different environment (perhaps externally exposed?), and with no indication of why it may or may not have been restarted after that time, that's not really a fair comparison either.
My thought was more that maybe a lot of the issues people are having with Linux to push them to BSD is what we, developers collectively, have done to Linux over the last 2-3 decades.
Ah, yes, good point!
> My thought was more that maybe a lot of the issues people are having with Linux to push them to BSD is what we, developers collectively, have done to Linux over the last 2-3 decades.
Indeed so. Especially in the last decade or so: snap, Flatpak, Wayland, systemd, etc.
It's being made gratuitously more and more complex to meet the demands of the main commercial users -- running cloud servers -- even if this makes like much more complicated for individual users.
Which is why I advocate the BSDs as an alternative, but man, they are all forbidding and offputting to beginners/novices, and some of them don't even realise why and how.
But come on…
All that’s been said about security updates etc aside (some of which can be mitigated with that fancy in-place kernel update stuff), If something hasn’t rebooted in 10 years I’m going to be a bit nervous about what happens when it does reboot. If it’s in an uptime fetishist environment, chances are that it’ll be rebooted at a time that’s…inconvenient to say the least. Are you SURE that nothing has changed in that time? Some people are! Moreso than others at least. But that’s extra work, and my bet is most places with these high-uptime machines aren’t putting that work In, or think they are and are doing it poorly.