Distro fatigue keeps me in the Squeeze of Debian
I tried out the Fedora 15 Alpha. GNOME Shell wasn't working on my hardware for some reason. I also tried Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity does work. OpenBSD 4.9's release is imminent.
Am I excited? No.
I'm in user mode. Not fanboy mode. I'm in no mood to run alpha-level software, or the dot-0 release of a new desktop environment (as in GNOME Shell and/or Unity). I kind of, sort of, need Flash on occasion.
I'm liking NetworkManager. I've been testing 3G/4G devices, and it's amazing how the Clear 4G device will actually auto-configure and run in Debian Squeeze, albeit in the Sprint-connected 3G mode. Still, better to have 3G than no G. Maybe a 4G USB device will make its way into the Linux kernel eventually. Would be nice.
But right here now, Debian Squeeze is too good, needs so little geeky attention, and just keeps on working as it does that I really can't distro-hop at present.
I've made concessions to Linux-style modernity: new kernels from Liquorix, and most recently new Iceweasel/Firefox 4.0 and Icedove/Thunderbird 3.1 from the Debian Mozilla team. (Note of caution: my existing Debian-packaged Icedove add-ons all ceased to work after going from 3.0.x to 3.1, but they never worked that well anyway, so I don't miss them.)
The reason the Debian "philosophy" about the Stable release works is that while there is an occasional package that might be a somewhat of a dud, version-wise, in the release, when it comes to major infrastructure choices, Debian is very conservative, and you're not going to find bleeding-edge technologies that have not been road-tested by lots of other people beforehand.
(That said, I'm surprised that Grub 2 made it into Squeeze, and I'm equally surprised that Grub 1 hung around so long in Fedora.)
Thanks to (and admiration for) the Debian development team for putting together such a great release -- you've made it a pleasure to run Linux.
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Why didn't you just install Ubuntu 11.04 and then install Gnome 3? I found Unity to be of awful design and replaced it immediately. There were some minor teething problems that I fixed in approximately twenty minutes which included: Gnome 3 themes had to be installed, my PATH was a bit screwed up (/usr/games was missing) after I upgraded from 10.10, and the webkit in Natty's repositories had a bug that affected Postler so I had to compile a nightly build. Oh, and I also had to remove some of my 10.10 repos that I didn't really need any more.
I think 11.04 was a bit immature and Unity should have not been included by default/held off till a later release. But, it's still a solid release and now that those initial problems are fixed everything is just running swimmingly.
What you say is the reason why the whole "distro release" is a crappy concept.
It's there because other OS users feel better when they can put a name on their OS, even if with daily patches it doesn't mean anything anyway.
Distro with Rolling releases is THE solution, IMHO.
I'm mostly Ubuntu / Linux Mint user....but Unity just doesn't win my "Love". Gnome 3 maybe....but maybe I'm just an old timer and like the known factor...so I revert back to the standard Gnome 2 environment in 11.04. I'm happy that way, but I do wonder how many services / daemons related to Unity keep running in the background and using system resources
But getting back to Debian....yes, I do like it as well and I always keep at least one of my home PCs (got several) running on it. I like the stability, and the rolling release thing...so you don't continue to hop hop hop b/ween distros. I can understand their policy on "Free" (as in speech and beer) policies, but that's not too user friendly (proprietary drivers for wireless / 3d Video for example). Right now I'm using a modified Debian (Remastersys image from that site) and I like it. I fully updated / patched it and installed all the other software that I need and created my own Remastersys image. I call it my "Debian 6 Plus Remix"
So, yes.......Debian is always good to keep around