The politics can, generally, be completely ignored unless you're actually interested.

Sorry. Just my snarky comment. I never enjoyed Debian, personally. But that's just me. I should give it a shot again one of these days.

One thing to note is that Linux installations evolve. That is, unlike Windows, you probably won't be reinstalling from scratch all the time. The form of this evolution is variable. If you have a distro that has a solid package tool, you might end up removing packages you don't use, upgrading those you do, etc. Or you might end up ignoring the package tool and installing new applications yourself. Or a combination of the two. Either way, you're likely to end up with an installation that looks nothing like what you started with.

Linux upgrading is also more of an evolutionary process than under Windows. More often that not, pieces and parts will be upgraded; not everything at once. That even includes the base OS. And, unlike Windows, that doesn't mean that your system will become less stable. It might, potentially, if you make bad choices, but it's more likely it'll end up more stable, or at least have more features. Windows seems to be a monolithic composite of a number of pieces of software, but Linux is more of a conglomeration, each of which uses the other pieces, but each of which is upgradable on it's own with a few exceptions here and there.