1) Mid-2010 MacBook Pro, with RAM and SSD upgrades. This is my main machine at home. It has never had to be wiped and reinstalled, and it gets rebooted about once a month.
2) Late-2013 MacBook Pro. This is my work machine and the story is similar to my home machine. It's never needed a reinstall and gets rebooted about once a month as well.
3) Lenovo ThinkPad x131e (Intel). This is my travel computer, serving a similar purpose as the Chromebook mentioned in this article (minus presenting stuff). I'm running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on this - frequent updates lead to frequent reboots. There's also all the associated weirdness that comes with running a rolling release Linux on a machine that requires proprietary WiFi drivers (they tend to lag by a couple of days). When I ran OpenSUSE Leap it was almost as solid as the Macs.
I'd call the Macs "pure solid" machines, or as close as I can reasonably get. The ThinkPad is decent and the weirdness with it is really my fault.
Despite using Arch Linux, and weekly "upgrade everything".
I know it isn't everyone's experience, but I was exceedingly choosey about the hardware that went into my machine, so that I could do this.
The only problem I've had in the last two years, was an incompatibility between ocaml and fish shell, which eliminated my PATH. Unfortunate, but an issue on the ocaml side of things. A big problem, for certain, but two years of bleeding edge updates, and that's it.
Mostly the same experience, running Debian Unstable on my X201. Keeping a simple environment (AwesomeWM and urxvt, rather than Gnome or KDE; dhcpcd, rather than NetworkManager) probably helps. I put it to sleep every day, often multiple times, and it never fails to come up, connect to Wifi, etc.
Oh, excellent; thank you. I mentioned it because this has bitten me, so I'll want to use that fix.
Fun story: for $REASONS, I have an Arch system with root on btrfs and /boot on ext4, and it doesn't usually have the boot partition mounted (it's a poorly done mutiboot issue). I recently discovered that this means if I forget to mount boot before updating I get stuck with no loaded drivers to mount /boot :) Thankfully kexec worked, but I'd like to not need to do that:)
My Macs have an uptime in months. Sometimes I have to restart a process, but needing to restart the machine is exceedingly rare outside of the normal security update related reboots.
Over the years I have given quite a few presentations to customers and at public talks. None of my machines ever let me down.
Does that actually exist?