Depending on your use case, Debian Stable can be a great thing. If it worked great on a given computer (i.e. everything works), and I was just writing or using programs that were themselves fairly "stable," then it will work.<p>If you're a developer and don't mind older packages, or if you install and manage your dev tools from outside the distribution, it can also work for you. This is a lot of people.<p>But if you rely on your distribution to provide reasonably up-to-date packages (and for better or worse, that's me right now), then Debian Stable might not be the right choice. When I do development in Linux, I tend to be more comfortable in Fedora, which is much more aggressive when it comes to updating packages during the life of a release. I'm not crazy about major upgrades every 6 months, though you can do it once a year if you wish.<p>For better or worse, I think that Ubuntu + PPAs is the path of least resistance -- if you trust the maintainers of your PPAs, that is.