dist-upgraded

You won't have to break in your new dist-upgraded or freshly installed system for like two weeks.

My current desktop was installed in 2007 and still just dist-upgraded to the current.

I destroyed it last year because I dist-upgraded to an unsupported version of Debian and man, was it unsupported.

Last time I dist-upgraded Debian (woody to etch?) and everything worked - if a tad slow.

Waldorf, updated sources to Jessie, commented out Waldorf sources and dist-upgraded.

I think I've got at least one that's been dist-upgraded all the way from a 4.x release to the current 7.0.

I just dist-upgraded to Jessie, and voila - PID 1 was suddenly systemd.

I have debian systems that are still running dist-upgraded versions of 10 year old installs, and the dpkg database is sane and clean.

I've dist-upgraded one desktop system for about a decade now with zero surprises.

I have just dist-upgraded since I installed 18.04, so maybe fresh installs don't?

I was using Debian testing and every time I dist-upgraded something broke.

When I dist-upgraded neither the keyboard nor the mouse worked under X11.

Another use for having multiple Debian subsystems (what Bedrock calls "strata") is to serve as a low risk alternative to an in-place dist-upgrade: If anything doesn't work as desired in the new Debian release, just keep using the previous one until you get it working; once everything's migrated over, you've effectively dist-upgraded and can (if you wish) remove the old stratum.