This series of posts highlights one of the features of Debian that's occasionally handy: you can usually upgrade between major stable releases in an automated way.
It can be good for workstation laptops, and for pets-not-cattle servers.
Stability for a couple years, then in-place upgrade to newer versions of things all at once. Whenever the timing is good for you (because you can keep using `oldstable` for a long time, with security updates).
Whether this upgrading incrementally keeps working smoothly for decades, I haven't read all of OP's posts to find out. But I've had machines running well after a few major upgrades, and even moving the HDD/SSD between upgraded laptop hardware.
I also started with 3.1 as my very first linux experience. I never felt the need to change distro over the years. Just yesterday I upgraded 3 servers to debian 13, one from debian 11 and one from 12.
I wish I had more stories to tell, but that’s the thing I like about Debian.
There are links at the end of each page and he does literally upgrade the same install up to the last.
It's a great read but...
I run Debian since version 1.1 (not 11 but 1.1) or so (and I was using Slackware before that) and I always re-install my entire system from scratch. I never ever upgrade.
YMMV but to me if you upgrade if either the old (with all your configs) or the new version has a security exploit you are toast. While if you re-install from scratch, you're only toast if the latest version has a security exploit.
Also it helps to keep my skills sharp: I'm forced to re-install and re-configure everything and I like it. I use the opportunity to enhance my shell scripts, to learn new stuff, to do a few things here and there in a better way, etc. FWIW I'm not on Trixie yet (except on one NUC): I need to switch one of these days (and I won't upgrade).
Now the usual disclaimer... I don't claim my way to be the way: to each his own bad taste.
This series of posts highlights one of the features of Debian that's occasionally handy: you can usually upgrade between major stable releases in an automated way.
It can be good for workstation laptops, and for pets-not-cattle servers.
Stability for a couple years, then in-place upgrade to newer versions of things all at once. Whenever the timing is good for you (because you can keep using `oldstable` for a long time, with security updates).
Whether this upgrading incrementally keeps working smoothly for decades, I haven't read all of OP's posts to find out. But I've had machines running well after a few major upgrades, and even moving the HDD/SSD between upgraded laptop hardware.
Some documentation about that on the Debian wiki:
https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedUpgrade
It's relatively deterministic too, I've used that combined with apt-offline to upgrade offline servers successfully.
I’m personally really happy people are interested enough to both try installing old operating systems using old hardware and blog about it!
I also started with 3.1 as my very first linux experience. I never felt the need to change distro over the years. Just yesterday I upgraded 3 servers to debian 13, one from debian 11 and one from 12.
I wish I had more stories to tell, but that’s the thing I like about Debian.
There are links at the end of each page and he does literally upgrade the same install up to the last.
It's a great read but...
I run Debian since version 1.1 (not 11 but 1.1) or so (and I was using Slackware before that) and I always re-install my entire system from scratch. I never ever upgrade.
YMMV but to me if you upgrade if either the old (with all your configs) or the new version has a security exploit you are toast. While if you re-install from scratch, you're only toast if the latest version has a security exploit.
Also it helps to keep my skills sharp: I'm forced to re-install and re-configure everything and I like it. I use the opportunity to enhance my shell scripts, to learn new stuff, to do a few things here and there in a better way, etc. FWIW I'm not on Trixie yet (except on one NUC): I need to switch one of these days (and I won't upgrade).
Now the usual disclaimer... I don't claim my way to be the way: to each his own bad taste.