"D.I. Redhouse" dir21@cus.cam.ac.uk writes:
Didn't it go through a period of being quite badly behind most of the other distributions?
Well, the "stable" releases tend to be just that: tried and tested stable versions of software rather than just whatever they managed to get to compile on time. If you just need the latest version of one package, then you can just say apt-get source packagename cd package-version debuild binary with an appropriate configuration, of course. Stable still has the benefit of security updates being made available very quickly, although you have to edit the config to enable that.
If you're feeling helpful then you can help debug the "testing" set, or if you want *everything* to be the latest and don't mind the occasional goof, "unstable" is for you.
Although equally it could be something to do with the fact that a Debian user round these parts once described/denounced RedHat as the Windows 95 of Linux distributions, and I developed a general theory concerning Debian users.
Well, Debian users are allowed to express themselves as badly as any other Linux user. What was probably meant is either that their build quality really isn't as good as it should be, or that RedHat's config tools are rather over-friendly and will happily obliterate any changes you make, while others fall over if you set things up the normal way.