Hacker News Reader

Agree it's made for servers. Great for older machines. Too often I've run into old libraries when I want to use a recent desktop app. I'm not knocking Debian but its kernel is older, dependencies are older. Great for stability. Ubuntu (based on Debian as you know) IMHO is a better laptop distro.

View on HN

That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution, use backports whenever you need a more recent version of something.

E.g. Debian stable comes with kernel 3.16, but 4.8 is available as an official backport, should you need the (almost) latest and greatest. Just add backports to sources.list && apt update && apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com