April 7th, 2020 at 2:16 AM
Gentoo is the hardest distribution of them all... You're on the deep end using that distribution.
I honestly don't find that Debian is terribly out of date. At least on the packages I've used, they tend to lag behind a couple versions, but they seem to have gotten better over the years a bit. If the distribution's version is a year or two old, it gets a little more noticeable, but when the new ones come out, they are generally not too bad.
The stability is what I love about it. It genuinely is much more stable than Ubuntu in my experience, and crashes far less (if ever). The downside is that it's almost impossible to actually update your packages to more recent versions if you need unless you compile them yourself. I hear there are a lot of solutions that make this easier and people have done it frequently, but I have never had any luck with them.
When a new version of Debian comes out, you get a chance to update to packages that are only slightly out of date, but then you have to wait two years before you can update anything easily again. That's where it truly bites.
I honestly don't find that Debian is terribly out of date. At least on the packages I've used, they tend to lag behind a couple versions, but they seem to have gotten better over the years a bit. If the distribution's version is a year or two old, it gets a little more noticeable, but when the new ones come out, they are generally not too bad.
The stability is what I love about it. It genuinely is much more stable than Ubuntu in my experience, and crashes far less (if ever). The downside is that it's almost impossible to actually update your packages to more recent versions if you need unless you compile them yourself. I hear there are a lot of solutions that make this easier and people have done it frequently, but I have never had any luck with them.
When a new version of Debian comes out, you get a chance to update to packages that are only slightly out of date, but then you have to wait two years before you can update anything easily again. That's where it truly bites.