Hello,

As has been stated Debian comes in basically three flavors. But they can 
be mixed. The difficulty depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

I like current software. Linux is moving so fast that a lot of times 
what you want is what is out now. That is a problem with the "current" 
stable Potato. When Woody becomes stable, I believe it will be somewhat 
less and issue. Sid (unstable) is Debian's development/upgrade/fix 
version. It is generally reasonably current.

Coming from a Macintosh (home) and Windows (work) background, restarts 
and crashes are a thing of life. I run Sid (unstable) and have the most 
stable computing experience of my life. The OS almost never crashes, 
restarts are rare. Most restarts have had little to do with the OS, but 
rather hardware or power situations. Uptime is normally in the weeks and 
months. I've never had such experience with any of my Mac or WinX 
machines. This is with the Debian Distribution called "unstable". :)

I currently prefer unstable to testing due my experiences with failed 
dependency issues in testing.

When Woody becomes stable, I will probably swith to it. You are able to 
control your application/library/etc sources with Debian. If you want 
Woody(when Stable)primarily but keep current on Galeon, Mozilla, 
Evolution, Alsa, NameYourFavoriteMustBeUpToDateApplication by using 
unstable as your source for those apps explicitly, you can do that.

Keeping your system up to date with Debian is sweet.
It is or can be a challenge to learn to install Debian or use dselect to 
add software. Having used Red Hat and switched to Debian I overall 
prefer the Debian experience. But it is not without it's learning curves 
and issues. They are just different.

HTH.

Jimmie Houchin

Stephen Pair wrote:

> [Sorry about continuing this OT thread]
> 
> I was considering Debian, but it appeared to me that several packages
> were a bit outdated.  It also seemed like they aren't up to the 2.4
> kernel yet (which I need).  When I read a little more, I found a lot of
> discussion about the quality of Debian  starting to suffer and
> complaints about them not being able to keep up with the latest
> packages.
> 
> Are these valid issues?
> 
> - Stephen
>> [snip]