Hello, I would like to hear opinions about the release cycle of the Stable Debian releases for a Desktop user.
I love the Debian ideals and perks (its social contract, independence from big companies...) and understand to a certain extent the fundamentals on why keeping "old-ish" versions of packages with backports and the Shiny new stuff syndrome, but I fail to see how Debian can make a useful desktop distribution with the current release cycle. For example: My main PC is an already two years old ryzen-based system and a Vega graphics card from 2017, and the kernel used in Stable has regressions which cause complete, unrecoverable system hangups on Vega cards which were not alleviated until kernel 5.3 onwards (and they still keep happening, though rarely!). This means that to ensure stability on a Debian installation I would need a backported kernel, or use Debian Testing or Sid, which IMO collides with the point of a Stable release. I also see everyday many announcements about performance (GNOME) and usability (KDE Plasma) improvements which are not exactly new features. This is obviously happening on more recent releases, which Debian may not see (unless these changes are also backported, which I would find extremely cumbersome?) until approximately two years have passed since that. All this makes me think that while Debian is a fantastic distribution, its Desktop, common user-facing side of things would greatly benefit from something like a separate yearly Stable release. Thanks, Sam
