I used to be of the opinion that Debian stable was too old, that its packages were outdated. Then I realized that I only need Emacs 24 (compile it from source) and a recent browser (both Chrome and Firefox have up-to-date repositories). I've been using Debian stable for over a year now, and I don't regret it. As a student, it is more important that my machine remain break-free that it is that I have the latest version of my bittorrent client.