"Stephen Pair" <spair at advantive.com> writes:
> Are these valid issues?

Well, I wouldn't agree that the quality is suffering, overall my
experience has been the opposite.

The kernel version issue and most package version issues are a red herring
- most people don't stay at the infrequently released "stable" version but
upgrade partially or wholly to the "testing" or "unstable" update streams
(in practice these are all plenty stable enough for daily use) so that
they can install a 2.4 kernel, newer packages or whatever.

Occasionally (not often) you'll find that something has not yet been
packaged or the package is lagging behind the latest version - in that
case if I need the newer version in a hurry I'll install from source,
until the package catches up.

Hope this helps,
-Simon