NixOS. Takes the fear away due to atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Lot of people can't get pass this language nix though. GuixSd is an alternative to check out. There are other immutable distros too if you're looking for something less radical.

NixOS's automatic snapshots and atomic updates take the fear out of nearly everything in my computer. It's so much less scary for me to muck with boot parameters or kernel modules if I know that I can always reboot and choose a previous generation.

I've told this story here before, but a few months ago I bought a laptop and installed NixOS on there. It worked fine except my USB keyboard would take about 5 seconds to "wake up" if I stopped typing for more than a minute.

If this were any other distro, I probably would have just lived with it, because I would be afraid of breaking Grub to a point where I don't know how to fix it, but with NixOS I figured out how to fix it, and now it's fixed, and it's backed up with git so I always have it if I ever need to do this on another computer.

Seconding this; I used solely Ubuntu for 15 years but switched to NixOS a few years ago. Using an immutable system feels like a weight being lifted off my back.

Funny how the most stable-over time OS I've ever used is Arch Linux. I had it running on an old netbook for almost 10 years, until they ended support for i386. I also have a laptop running Arch since I bought it on 2018, so it's been seven years. Never a clean reinstall on any of the machines. Just the usual upgrades, which in Arch means running the package manager every once in a while, and following upgrade guidelines in the rare occasion there's a need for something a bit more involved (90% of the time is simply installing reinstalling a package).

What about rolling releases?

I've been using Manjaro for almost a decade, of course it's not perfect but at least the rolling release model makes it suited for being upgraded instead of reinstalled.

If you install Manjaro using BtrFS + timeshift + timeshift autosnap it creates snapshots after every system upgrade that can be quickly rollbacked if something goes wrong

+1 for rolling releases.

I run NixOS on my laptop and server, and do updates about once a week. I don’t use Timeshift but I do use the NixOS snapshots if an update breaks stuff.

But I really haven’t had any issues with an update breaking anything. I don’t really want to go back to the major release model.

It's a bit sad that to keep a computer running smoothly you have to jump through these hoops. I end up with applications building up so much crap in my homedir on linux or appdata / winsxs on windows, I wind up feeling like I need to clean things out once every year or two too.

I try to look at a clean reinstall as a good chance to make sure my backups and restore process are working too. Maybe take a chance to experiment with a different distribution or organize things differently, or new bootloader.