> > > > Sure other OSs do: Try convincing OpenBSD that you want a newer kernel. > They'll tell you to wait six months. OTOH, NetBSD is a hacker's dream. > Take your pick. FreeBSD may also do what you need but I haven't used it > yet. > > I agree that it would be nice to have something a litle more often than > we get with Stable but a little more stable than Testing, but it doesn't > exist. To make it exist would pull developers' time from the system as > it stands. > > For this reason, and not in any way to tell you to go away, you may wish > to consider one of the BSDs. They can run binary linux apps in > compatibility mode while having a large repository of packages ready to > install. Their pkg_add is very similar to apt-get; I haven't found > anything equivalent to aptitude ncurses interface.
I must say I definitely did consider that. FreeBSD looks like a lot of what I may want - it's ports is second only to Debian's package tree in software available, and each port can be updated independently. On the other hand, its hardware support lags behind Linux somewhat. Debian actually seemed most in line with what I wanted, as it seems like the least monolithic of the distributions and the most stable. I even seem to remember a Debian developer speak of incorporating backports and making stable images with updated kernels for hardware support available at some point. In any case, I don't mean to irritate anyone. I'm just pointing out what I have found, by far, to be the #1 drawback of most Linux distributions - either you're stuck with what the distro gives you for n months, you install packages from some unofficial repo (if you're lucky), or you futz with tarballs - and see if anyone is working on solutions/is doing anything other than the obvious.
