However I am sticking with "pure" Debian for the moment. I have not yet given up on it. I am using everyone's work hosted on Alioth. I will probably deploy an unofficial 'Sarge' on amd64 in a production environment. Eventually an official Debian 'Etch' will replace it.That will probably take around 2-3 years before that happens which means all other major distrubtions will probably already have both an gcc-3.4 and gcc-4.0 amd64 port.
Yup. I have to admit, I've been waiting for a splinter group to release Debian Metastable.
I really like Debian but the release process seems to be very slow, if not too slow. Is Debian stable even keeping up with hardware advances?
Well, kinda. Stable can accept newer 2.4 kernels and new drivers for existing categories of hardware do get added to the 2.4 kernel series. The kernel-package will build them (from kernel.org downloads) in a way that is easy enough to manage. In that sense, you can support many fairly modern peripherals albeit often in a legacy compatibility mode (due to the 'existing categories' constraint). For a server, which is what Stable is supposed to be for, you're probably ok. However, I personally do recommend tieing your server hardware upgrade cycle to Debian's releases, just like Wintel shops tend to tie their upgrades to Microsoft releases, due to the infrequency and inflexibility of each major release. Hardware whose drivers are in 2.6 only will probably be unhappy, even if you go to the trouble of making your Stable machine run a 2.6 kernel using the various unofficial archives. My point of view is that, if you're going to replace so much of the core infrastructure to get 2.6 support, you may as well replace everything else too and go to Testing.
Is it even possible to install stable on a new computer and will it take advantage of hardware advances like SATA, Gigaethernet and so on so forth? Ok, enough ranting :)
On all my recent machines, the old Stable installer fails to cope with the hardware. In every case, I was forced to use Knoppix (or DFS) to get a runtime environment and then use (c)debootstrap to get the initial install finished. On all except one, I was able to finish the install to Stable, replace the kernel with something more modern and reboot successfully. Some of them became Testing machines later on, of course. The remaining machine couldn't even reboot using Stable, due to the need for kernel features that Stable can't operate without a lot of workarounds, so I had to cdebootstrap directly to Testing from DFS.
I haven't tried SATA on Stable. I simply buy the 1000bT cards that are in the 2.4 kernel series and thereby have no trouble.
Hope that helps, 8-)PS. If you're embarrassed about ranting on your own, given nobody else seems to be doing so, you obviously haven't read the archives. I suspect (without checking) that everybody on this mailing list has had a good rant on the subject at least once. Anybody who feels excluded by that statement is welcome to jump in. 8-)