I have never had to update my mint 18.3 in 5 years now. I check for app updates but have never had to update the OS. So the “update, update, update” mentality from windows just doesn’t apply to Linux.
For me the coolest thing is how it checks for any extra dependencies an app or utility might need that you do not already have. Then it goes and fetches these too and adds these to the download and install as one combined operation. This is far superior to the “windows experience”.
Smaller footprint on the hard drive too since the programs aren’t compiled into exe files and they use a lot of shared libraries. You can see it when you install what you think of as a pretty heavy program and it only downloads 2,000kb.
There are constant updates to Linux Mint 18.3. The whole package gets updates even weekly, but most are for sub packages that are not pure OS related.