Over the course of a lunch hour yesterday I updated the operating system on the Basternae box. It was running Ubuntu 10.04. It’s now on Ubuntu 12.04. It took about 45 minutes to finish the whole process including testing and fixes. Only one thing broke in the process. The Django web framework, which runs about half of my websites, was uninstalled by the upgrade process. I had to manually reinstall it, which took about 10 minutes.
I remember upgrading a Red Hat 5 box to Red Hat 9 many years back. The process took about 10 hours to finish and get everything working again. Easy upgrades are a good thing.