But yeah it's often that people don't understand what's Debian stable and its trade offs compared to Testing and end up unhappy with it or switching to Ubuntu (which is ~very~ similar to Debian Testing).
Also, this: https://www.debian.org/security/faq.en.html#testing
> there is a minimum two-day migration delay
>there is security support for testing, but in general it cannot be expected to be of the same quality as for stable:
>Updates for testing-security usually get less testing than updates for stable-security.
>Updates for embargoed issues take longer because the testing security team does not have access to embargoed information.
>Testing is changing all the time which increases the likelyhood of problems with the build infrastructure. Such problems can delay security updates in testing.
How does it works? 1. Upstream release a new version, it goes to unstable. 2. Package is tested for some days in unstable and get promoted to testing.
So telling that testing doesn't get security updates is somewhat incorrect, since you are grabing recent software. But by the other hand having too recent software also has its downside ;)
https://www.debian.org/security/faq.en.html#testing
> there is a minimum two-day migration delay
Now you are making way to many assumptions with this phrase.
Do you really think that make sense to have critical security updates for stable having to pass through the normal release cycle? :)
I'm speaking from experience that when I was using Debian testing I would usually receive security updates days after they are available for Debian stable.
Obviously security updates for stable do not go through normal release cycle.
I wasn't commenting stable security updates, but lack of timely access to security updates on testing.
Stable basically means it won't change, and says nothing about freshness. Debian has recently adopted a policy of releasing on a time basis, so it's never very stale.
Though the truly baffling bit of Debianese is "contrib" which means "this is free software but depends on non-free software." I can kinda see how it came to mean that, but it's very non-intuitive.