Comment by mesrik

Red Hat patching slowness and upgrades from major version to next were reasons I gave up after 16 years using their distributions, including RHEL.

I had to fall back patching, repackaging and maintaining multiple times while waiting sometimes weeks them to issue fixed packages. I don't know what happened to Red Hat over the years, already before IBM purchased them. But they became too slow on this kind of issues.

Debian consistently provided fixes quickly next day at least and I never had any issues upgrades since from 7 to 12, when I retired. Only reason to do complete reinstall was that ext3 and ext4 disk formats had improvements, which made life bit easier with 64bit systems.

ps. No problems from 12 to 13 any more with my own systems at home.