Many times I’ve add to add external/weird repositories to get some functionalities i rrallneeded (eg: appropriate codecs fir bluetooth audio and a version of bluez that supported by bluetooth headsets) and that kind of tainting really endangers the longevity of a debian-based system.
I understand that the fault is completely on the external repositories and on the user… however the choice then is to be able to use my hardware (or, in general, to the kind if computing i need) or not.
These days I’m using fedora btw, which has been really stable while providing fairly up-to-date packages.
Debian is for people who want to configure a server once and have it stay running and secure.
"Stability" in Debian's context means _version_ stability, not that it doesn't crash. I think most Linux distros aim to not crash.
Indeed, I moved to Fedora and I haven't looked back.
I was already using RHEL and CentOS (later Rocky Linux) on servers, I guess it's bye-bye time for Debian.
> Debian is for people who want to configure a server once and have it stay running and secure.
The same could be said for RHEL and most of its derivatives though.
That's not a problem with debian, that's just a mismatch in needs, you're probably better off with a "less" stable operating system.
I'll be honest, i haven't had any stability issues with Fedora either, and i've been upgrading as often as i would with Debian. And in both cases, i'm using fairly old and known hardware (years old thinkpads, the T440 and the X270).
Of course in theory they could also try to backport the changes, but I doubt anyone would bother for anything that’s not hugely popular. I’m tired of distro patches generating support load anyway.
Have the maintainer do stable/oldstable updates when backwards compatibility is broken.
Have the package removed from Debian stable/testing and have it only in unstable and the new fastrack.debian.net repo.
True. And yes, Debian stable packages do not work so well if a package needs to undergo frequent updates. As others have pointed out there are work arounds in place - like backports. Or if you want a Ubuntu / Arch like experience, you could try Debian testing. But they are kludges and for some packages the pain got so great Debian was forced to brake it's own rules and pushes new version into stable. But that's rare - Debian stable is so popular because it's stable.
The underlying reason for that focus seems to be Debian is a distribution put together by sysadmin's. A large chunk of the DD's (Debian Developers) are sysadmins pooling their resources to produce a distribution they can use in their day job. The two things that matters to them are security and stability. It's not an accident that Debian led the way on reproducible builds. This mob really cares about rock solid and secure.
To me Debian model of "sysadmin's pooling their resources" is remarkable. It's one of the few open source driver projects that combines open source and commercial objectives. At its heart is a whole pile of people teaming up in an open source project to create a tool (a server OS) they base their respective (and disparate) commercial products. The open nature of Debian - it's ethos, it's transparency, is critical to why this works so well. It allows the participants who might well be producing competing products to trust each other, and continue to work along side it other for decades now to produce a distribution. It also means it's always going to have a strong server focus.
That focus doesn't mean not to say Debian can't be used for a Desktop. A stable base like that is a very attractive thing to build a desktop on, and that's what happened. It's my daily driver, and I think it works wonderfully - but I also hand install some things from outside Debian (like youtube-dlp), and make liberal use of docker containers when I need to pin certain versions for development. It's a bit of work - but as a developer it's stuff I have to do anyway. It created an opportunity to create a derivative that caters to the desktop users who aren't like me and just want the latest shiny - and Ubuntu stepped into it.