UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

I'm not disagreeing with you, per se, but your claim that "updates have habit of breaking stuff? Debian doesn't do that." seems about as, how did you put it, constructive, as the question.

I'd always recommend CentOS or RHEL, but it doesn't matter. What matters, is what has already been pointed out: there's really no right answer to this question. It's horses for courses: you pick an OS / distribution based on what you want it for. I've even stopped using VMs, for the most part, in favour of Docker containers as much of what I need them for is ephemeral in nature, and I don't need them clocking up my hard drive.

debian based ubuntu / linux mint updates never broken anything up until linux mint 18.x, which simply doesn't run on my machine. Same with Fedora25, a big frustrating update hell. Since Fedora 26 everything is fine, very fine, excellente! I remember that suse minor release updates never worked, and even major releases left a broken system.

Still the best suggestion (for me) is openVZ and other suggestions don't accept because they did not develop specially for virtualization and they are multifunctional OS.
welcome to new hints
Thanks all.