This is one of the SEVERAL reasons I would never use
Linux, but prefer VMS. (VMS is free for non-commercial use;
for commercial use, it does cost money, but a) you get what
you pay for and b) it more than pays for itself since one needs
far fewer people to keep it running.) I have NEVER had to do
a fresh install. OS upgrades or patches are out-of-the-box.
It just works. I'm even running the latest version of VMS on
hardware which is 15 years old, and of course an executable
produced 15 or 20 years ago will still run on the most modern
hardware, with any version of the OS.

I'm fortunate to have a VMS day job, but I also have VMS at home.
No need to worry about viruses! True, it's not a popular virus
target, but even if targeted it is difficult or impossible to
write a virus.

Some folks might have used VMS several years ago and think it
is somewhat old-fashioned. Actually, it is still being developed
and was recently ported to Itanium hardware.