Debian Testing is pretty much what many Debian users use on a daily basis. They pretty much invented the notion of rolling releases. Debian stable is of course not cut that often. Ubuntu has a higher frequency of updates. But still, their LTS releases are spaced two years apart. 26.10 follows the recent LTS 26.04 release, so that gives them a good 1.5 years to work on stabilizing this. I've been using Ubuntu server LTS releases for the last ten years or so with generally no major issues. There are always some minor headaches between updates but generally nothing that worries me.

The main criticism here seems to be that these packages need a bit more work or are still lacking certain important features. Getting them out in a non LTS release like this is how they get packages to be ready for LTS releases. If you need LTS now, 26.04 is what you should be using. By 28.04, this should be rock solid.

For me what's risky here is deviating from what other distros are doing. Including Debian. Ubuntu has a history of being opinionated not everything they push through being adopted with great enthusiasm (e.g. Snap). You could make the point here that waiting for Debian to pick this up would be nicer. But you could also make the point that waiting for that is a very slow process.

ever used backports? no need to go to sid. Flatpack/Appimage/Compile from source for the rest (on my debian machine it's just kicad that is not installed from APT, well and the couple of softwares that don't do deb)

Firmwares, that's another story, i have fedora on the laptop for that.

> The problem comes when you have to use proprietary software made by incompetent vendors, and that only works in Ubuntu If i want to do FPGA development, either ubuntu or a distro old enough to package JDK 11 (sigh) and X. not XWayland. Debian 11 was the last one to have JDK 11 i think (talk about ancient..)

Needless to say FPGA is done on the windows machine these days.