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Comment by denysonique | Hacker News Reader

I see this old-package argument over and over again and I think it is inaccurate, considering that an estimated 95% of Ubuntu users use the LTS version, the below table demonstrates that Debian 12 (stable) packages are newer than those of of Ubuntu 22.04. Both Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 are LTS versions with 5 years of support.

    Ubuntu 22.04
        Kernel 5.19 (new installs only, existing installs 5.15)
        systemd 249
        KDE Plasma 5.24
        Gnome 42


    Debian 12
        Kernel 6.1
        systemd 252
        KDE Plasma 5.27
        Gnome 43

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Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS tend to alternate with respect to who has newer packages, because Debian ships on odd years and Ubuntu LTS on even years.

For most purposes, though, I find that I increasingly don't care about 1 or 2 years of difference in the base OS. Most of the toolchain is stable and well established. There are only a small handful of things I want to pin to a specific version (like node.js or Python), but these can usually be installed side by side with default packages. If not, I can always install it in a container. :)

Whilst I'm no longer an Ubuntu user due to their snap debacle, I don't think this is all that fair, they released over a year apart and LTS is LTS for a reason :)

This is true by definition. Ubuntu releases are forked from Debian at the time of their release, so Ubuntu 22.04 is where Debian was in April 2022.

I have always used stable on my servers and testing on my laptop but I recently switched to stable on the laptop with kernel from backports (I have fairly recent hardware). I have never been happier :) (to be fair, staging was fairly stable too, but still broke small stuff occasionally, and I feel I'm too old to deal with this ^^)

I realised this myself recently. I have used Ubuntu LTS for a long time, I don't use the in-between releases. They have about the same release cadence as Debian (2ish years) so I'm usually not losing anything much by moving to Debian.

Ubuntu probably do the HWE kernel better than stable backports kernel, the HWE kernel has a release schedule.

There's been more community support for Ubuntu in the form of PPAs but Flatpak has mostly solved that problem for the things I care about.

As such, I've already switched all my laptops to Debian, and will switch my desktop and work computer when I can be bothered.

> Ubuntu probably do the HWE kernel better than stable backports kernel, the HWE kernel has a release schedule.

For a while the Debian kernel packages had -ckt suffix (Canonical Kernel Team), although it doesn't seem to be the case any more.

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