That's the exact reason I stopped using that stuff. Nothing is worse than the roommate complaining about being unable to watch tv while the raid 5 rebuilds.
That's where "stable" distributions (like, e.g., Debian stable) come into play.
You only get updates for security-related stuff (and, IIRC, stuff-breaking bugs), which seldom break things.
How do you manage with all the upgrading and maintenance? It seems like a simple distro upgrade could throw various stability-oriented subsystems like "photos of my family" into compete chaos.