I just need to gush for a minute. I am about to shutdown my server in order to move it to the basement. This off the shelf $300 desktop running Pop!_OS is my self-hosting server that has dutifully done it’s job without a single complaint. It has been rebooted maybe three times since 2020 and it currently has an uptime of 840 days. That’s 840 days of not ever thinking about this thing. It self updates via Cron jobs and just…works.
I am afraid to open the box up though. Those dust bunnies must be huge.
You can’t allow to lose sight of context. In general I agree with you, but this is not a production server or even a system exposed to the Internet. This is an internal server hosting my stuff to me and only accessible via a VPN server that is on a different machine that is updated regularly who in turn is behind secure physical network devices with their own rules. This machine only job was to be available when called upon and it always has been. It does not need a kernel update although it could use one. All software on it is up to date and all security patches are updated regularly. If by any chance the system was fully compromised, all the culprit would get are tertiary copies of my movies and music collections, which they can enjoy, and a bunch of tertiary copies of my VeraCrypt virtual drives in which I replicate my backups. Again, context.