Everything is automated today, cloud this and cloud that, but very few people know just how vulnerable everything is behind the scenes, and why being a system administrator is so demanding and difficult. This is also why I care very little for all the hype and buzz, words like “DevOps” and “secure by virtualization” is even a grandeur delusion than the problems described above.

From the article.

For some time I’ve been wondering if, in the context of low-effort system maintenance, the occasional breakage in a rolling distro like Archlinux or Gentoo (with an auto-update cron job even!) is a lower impact×risk than attempting a set&forget Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS 10-year LTS install.

Server and desktop(someone else’s, which you support) alike.