I installed debian the other day, and it's been working great for me. I went with the "testing" release because unstable sounds scary (despite many people's assertions that it's fine) and "stable" in ancient with a capital A. It was an easy install (I used the new installer), I got everything I wanted, and apt-get worked great. A few little tweaks were necessary, but it's the first box I've ever got the nvidia drivers working on, and all was good. I thought I was set going forward, since I could always just apt-get my to latest version of things.
Then yahoo changed their protocol, and gaim .77 stopped working. Unstable has .79 now which fixes it, but it hasn't been moved to testing yet, and it's been a week without any instant messenger. If you were on stable, the distro that's supposed to be what you use if you're not a debian developer, you'd be on .58, and would have been without instant messanging for, oh, like a year or so. That's not exactly a rining endorsement for running "stable." Shouldn't critical patches to things that are required to make things work make it to stable?
So debian's got it's share of warts. I'd probably love it on the server, happily running stable, never upgradring, but on the desktop where you need the latest and greatest to even keep up with the rest of the world, I don't know if it's going to work for me now. Pretty frustrating wanting to talk to some friends and not being able to. Windows just keeps looking better and better every day. Should I bump up to unstable? Who knows....
apt-get install gaim/testing
Nothing says you can only use the packages from the base release you've installed.
I'm running testing for everything...but the gaim is only .77 there. .79 only exists on "unstable" which has too many dire warnings about not working for long periods to seem remotely appropriate for day to day use. Deeply buried on the debian page I found an app that shows why things aren't in testing yet, and here's the current page for gaim. It's got 6 days left, plus needed to be built on a bunch of architectures, etc., so who knows how long. I'm not saying I don't like Debian; redhat /fedora and other distros suffer basically the same problem, it's only alleviated because of efforts like freshrpms.
In fact I did an upgrade of everything needing an upgrade last night and it worked sweet. And with a bunch of hacking, I was able to get gaim .79 installed, so I'm back online. It just wasn't nearly as "apt-get upgrade gaim".
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