Several months ago, my machine, a samsung, quit (sort of...it won't save files and there's plenty of room on the hard drive). I eventually developed a plan, in lieu of saving to a usb stick, being to put 7.1 on a new Lenovo Ideapad once 7.1 arrived and then move all my stuff over. Meanwhile I started using an old IBM T60P running debian wheezy, while keeping the 7.0 Vector workhorse machines running at the office. 7.1 has been a long time coming. I notice with debian that often, perhaps every week, I will get a warning "your systems needs to be updated," or "security updates are available." I then go to synaptic package manager, click "mark all upgrades", usually two or three programs install, the warning sign disappears and I go about my business.. These updates don't seem to install programs, but rather, I think, utilities of some nature or another are installed. I have no problem with this, though the wheezy programs are somewhat dated (often quite a bit out of date). For example, wheezy still has lyx 2.03, which is 3 or 4 versions out-of-date. This never happened for long with Vector as I was almost always able to install new versions of software and kept my system up-to-date that way.
I don't recall that Vector issues update/security notices nearly as often. Yet my wordpress site was recently hacked (blacklisted, after I started maintaining it on the debian machine) and I never was hacked while maintaining it on my samsung..
So, finally, here is my question: Are these debian update/security notices needed and, if so, does hata_ph's regular posting of new software (which I read regularly) perform the same basic function?