For desktop users it fits a decent niche, and I tend to recommend it, even though I use Debian myself. Debian stable tends to have things too out of date by the end of a release cycle for most desktop users' tastes (though that can be partially addressed via the backports repository). You can get the always-current version by tracking unstable, which doesn't actually break as much as the name implies, but it does have dependency issues relatively frequently. If you aren't comfortable doing dependency resolution in aptitude, it isn't the best choice imo. Having checkpointed releases mitigates most of the upgrade-conflicts issues, because various upgrade paths are usually tested to make sure the default apt dependency resolution does the right thing with them (Debian stable does this upgrade-path testing very thoroughly between releases, but Ubuntu at least does some of it).