I'm in the same situation now with Debian Squeeze that I was in back when Debian Lenny was the stable release:

I can't think of a system that allows me to do so much, so efficiently and without trouble as Debian Stable.

Debian Stable can be boring. Nothing new enters the archive. Except this time I'm using Debian Backports, the Liquorix kernels built for Debian, the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive, Google's Chrome browser repository and Dropbox's Debian/Ubuntu repository in addition to Debian Multimedia to shape Debian the way I want and need it.

So as much as I'd like to give some of my other favorite operating systems a try (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenBSD ...), I'd be crazy to give up Debian as my daily workhorse operating system. It works without complaint. And that means I work without complaint.

I can't help but think that a key component of all of this is the GNOME 2 desktop, which is on the way out in favor of the still-controversial (and not all-the-way functional/finished) GNOME 3. That will come into Debian by the next stable release. Let's hope it works.

Back when I was running Lenny, I got bored and tried to dist-upgrade to Squeeze (then the Testing release, and I don't think there were release notes for Squeeze to help me do the upgrade right). I blew out the installation and then moved on to other systems.

I'm going to try very hard not to make that mistake this time around. Squeeze is running so very, very well that I am extremely reluctant to mess with it on my hardware (Lenovo G555 with AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB SATA hard drive).

I don't write as often as I'd like, and my aim is to write less about what OS I'm running and more about everything (and anything) else. But I've been working very hard lately, using Debian to do it, and I thought it deserved a mention.

I tend to write more when things aren't working right, but with Debian, that's seldom the case.

I'm doing an update today on my daughter's Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-running Gateway Solo 1450, the 2002-era laptop that I upgraded from 8.04 in a not-seamless but doable operation for someone with a bit of experience in these matters.

I've done a lot of upgrades. I'd say maybe half were successful. That doesn't say much for upgrades. But when it comes to Ubuntu upgrades, I can generally make them work with a bit of Googling.

I've been hard on Ubuntu 10.04 over the life of the release. (I could find links, but I'm just going to keep writing.) While the UI changes in 11.04 (GNOME giving way to Unity) are bigger, I thought the changes from 9.10 to 10.04 were too huge and unproven for an LTS release. My opinion was and is that 10.04 needed to be 9.10 with bug fixes and not a total reworking of the GNOME theme with buttons on the other side of the screen and lots of unproven, slightly broken Ubuntu-coded (or -ordered) enhancements.

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