Debian was always there, they deserve what they get.
I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.
But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.
Sorry but that's an asinine reply. The people looking for the support are busy doing something and looking to pay a company for the support. If they had the time to volunteer for support, they wouldn't be looking for support themselves. You're the one touting Debian out of nowhere, you can't ask the people you're talking to, to volunteer to make your point better.
Debian handles all of these transitions by itself during upgrade process, and shows you a nice readme before starting all of them.
For example, Debian has finished two big transitions recently. Merging /usr and 64 bit time support. Both are done on testing, and even on testing nothing has broken.
Another big change (which also made HN front page via LWN) was /tmp behavior change. It's handled differently. If your system is already installed, it doesn't change the behavior, but new systems will behave differently.
All of these changes are again communicated via "NEWS" mechanism. If Debian changes a config file, it's replaced. If you modified this file, apt will ask what you prefer, and you can diff the file in place.
In the past, many similar changes are made, and all were transparent. If you're not using any external repositories which change tons of system packages with their own versions, nothing changes during upgrades for you.
While there's an extensive release note provided with every release like [0], the upgrades are pretty straightforward.
As a result, having a few or many Debian systems which are older than a decade is a norm, not an exception.
There are a lot of HPC sysadmins that are very busy lately. A lot of third party software started dropping CentOS 7 support this year, and they never upgraded their clusters to 8/9.
The situation is pretty backwards for us, ironically.
Upgrading the OS is easy. Initial work is a couple of days, rest of the deployment is an hour or so, but the software we need to run doesn't support CentOS 7+. Containerization might help or not, but most software is distributed as RPM packages and some of them are written with things like Python2.7.
As the IBM constructorships’ beams cut up this ecosystem you kind of see why the head Vogon has no sympathy because the plans have not been “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.
But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.