Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense, but that's kind of the fun of linux on the desktop. Also, if you really haven't updated in three years, that means that you're still running kernel 3.16, which has 81 known vulnerabilities[0], 12 of which are critical. That's the kind of stuff I don't really want to worry about anymore. [0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/p...
Long time (but not very religious about it) Linux user here. What operating system allows you to "not worry about" OS security updates, and how is it different from Linux?
In my experience, on Linux such installations are smooth for about a year and a half, and then start failing for cryptic reasons, even if you've done everything possible to pick a mainstream distro, ideal hardware, and keep the machine as vanilla as possible.
(And I say this as someone who's been using Linux since the 1990's.)