I'm currently trying out both Debian and Ubuntu on my MacBook to see which one I prefer. Right now, I'm currently liking Debian better - the stability seems better, and it seems easier to customize - but I need to run software that's newer than what's in etch (not for a lust for bleeding-edge, but simply for the reason that my MacBook won't suspend or do proper power management in any kernel older than 2.6.22). I also want to be able to get updated packages such as the newest Firefox...er..Iceweasel (still hate that name, would prefer something less silly).
I know the easy Debian solution is to run testing/unstable - it seems like most people do. However, then you lose the advantage of stability. I actually tried testing and unstable, but found a critical bug pertaining to my video card - my system likes to reboot on suspend with the new Xorg drivers (yes, dutifully reported it to BTS). For this reason, I figure I'll confine Lenny/Sid to a VM or chroot, and I've been looking into backports. However, backports.org doesn't seem to have what I need (it only has 2.6.21 kernel, doesn't have the new acpi-support, not to mention some extra gstreamer plugins I wanted). What would be the ideal solution for me? Is there a reliable way to roll my own backports using apt to pull in dependencies? Can I build from Sid sources on an as-needed basis? I've come across a tool called "apt-build" which pulls down dependencies and builds from source - is it what I need? What should I put in my sources.list ? On a side note, I will say that the one area I think FOSS lags behind Windows and Mac is in updating individual system components. I LIKE being able to update a few things without hackish solutions (i.e. build from source tarballs) or updating my whole system. You can do it easily on Mac/Windows, but it's quite difficult and unreliable on nearly every distribution. I think Debian really ought to look into making backports an official project and integrating it into the stable release as a way to get updates on an as-needed basis. It may even be an interesting idea to do point releases of stable with some backports included. Has this ever been discussed? It seems a lot better than simply speeding up the release cycle...
