>My system is used for work (I work from home exclusively) and stuff I do
>sometimes can be mission-critical in that if I'm notified, I might have
>to go and do some work right away on something important. Customers
>would be relying on my ability to fix things. So, I really can't afford
>something to go down on my machine. This is why I have a spare laptop
>just in case my "main" laptop has a problem. They are both set up
>identical and data files are backed up very frequently so all I need to
>do is get the backups onto the spare laptop and be good to go within
>minutes.
>
>Stability, in my case, is a must. However, I do like to have newer
>features as well.
I'd say based on what you describe you should keep your old system and just create a small partition to practice debian on your spare time.
By the way, did you guys hear about the mother of all security bugs that was uncovered last weekend that affects all ms-win 7,8,10 by some google project-group who have yet to uncover a ton of security bugs on android? MS already patched it for all the valid licensed customers, which leaves a few million out on their crack-jobs.