I've been having great success running their rolling release (Tumbleweed). I've basically rolled the same install forward for almost a decade on some machines with no real issues.
For people who want the "batteries-included" Ubuntu-like experience, but without the semi-annual release schedule (which often requires a complete reinstall in my experience; upgrading usually has messed up something on my servers), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good option to consider.
edit: I primarily recommend this for desktop installations. Server installations may have different requirements, but for a daily driver that will work pretty much everywhere, it is a very good option to consider.
Debian upgrades just work; if you're tired with Ubuntu breaking stuff that's the closest and easiest option.
I have 4 machines (2 desktops, 2 servers) with 10+ years of just being updated, plus few hundred that have 5+ years (we migrated to Debian at work few years ago after using Centos; best decision ever, thousands of lines of code in configuration management removed that were just fixes for centos stuff..)
Did you consider other RHEL-compatible distros (e.g. Alma, Rocky, or even Oracle Linux which I've found to work quite well despite the negativity towards Oracle)?
I'm glad to hear the Debian update process is smooth, as I'm getting started building a homelab this weekend with Proxmox (Debian-based). Definitely don't want to completely reinstall my hypervisor on a regular basis!
From my experience RHEL family distros upgrade fairly painlessly between point releases, but with major releases you are better off just reinstalling because of the massive changes between those releases.
Fedora is also usually pretty easy to upgrade between releases these days as long as you follow the instructions.
RHEL's model is similar to Sun's old model. You sell a small, stable core OS that is well supported for it's lifetime. You are supposed to use it until there is an new version then start using that with the plan for the systems using the old OS to retire. IE. upgrade path is whole-system based and it really isn't designed for upgrading in place.
There are PPD alternatives for those (at least Firefox, I haven't tried the others).
But yeah, it's starting to look like it's time to think about jumping ship to something else entirely. I'm thinking Manjaro; I want a distro that's serious about KDE (currently using Kubuntu) and there aren't many of those these days.
I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc). Sometimes I would choose the wrong thing and break something that was relying on some behavior, but not captured by zypper/yum (e.g. a cmake project relying on specific behavior of some native library). Ultimately, that was my fault for being lazy in the "untracked external dependency" department, and it's easy to roll back with snapper.
> I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc).
I'm not sure how all of this really shakes out formally, but one of the cool things about using a SAT solver for dependency resolution is that it is guaranteed to be complete: if a solution exists to the dependency resolution problem presented by your package management operation, zypper/libsolv is guaranteed to find it.
But sometimes, a weird thing may happen, and no such solution will exist. In a case like that, the best zypper can do is offer to amend your request in various (hopefully) minimal ways, and ask if you agree that any of those outcomes are 'good enough'. IME, zypper is pretty good at this. But unfortunately, answering those questions may require you to have a clearer picture of your system's state and your goals than many users/administrators do.
The safest thing to do when presented with those prompts is, of course, to abort. But snapper definitely makes messing around and trying your options less punishing than it might be!
For people who want the "batteries-included" Ubuntu-like experience, but without the semi-annual release schedule (which often requires a complete reinstall in my experience; upgrading usually has messed up something on my servers), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good option to consider.
edit: I primarily recommend this for desktop installations. Server installations may have different requirements, but for a daily driver that will work pretty much everywhere, it is a very good option to consider.