Debian has historically run on an approximately 2-year release cycle (and more recent releases have been closer to that cadence). Right now, Testing is kind of

Debian has historically run on an approximately 2-year release cycle (and more recent releases have been closer to that cadence). Right now, Testing is kind of old, because it's been frozen in the run-up to the Wheezy release. In a month or two, Testing will probably be mostly current, and will stay that way until about 18 months' time when the Jessie freeze kicks in, and then it'll be a slow wait until the release of Jessie and then the cycle repeats. Ubuntu is too... opinionated for my tastes, and other distros are too conservative (CentOS/RHEL) or too wild (Arch, Gentoo). Debian Testing seems to have a high-quality, comprehensive package archive and keep reasonably up-to-date, and if the price to pay is that for six months every two years you get a stable desktop environment instead... no complaints from me. EDIT: The usual lag between Testing and Unstable is 10 days, except in big, complicated transitions and dependencies (say, when a commonly used shared library is being upgraded to a new, incompatible ABI). Again, I could probably be more up-to-date if I tracked Unstable instead of Testing, but I'd rather wait for Debian to nail down its migration plan in Unstable so I can upgrade smoothly, rather than have the latest and greatest and have to rebuild my own packages occasionally.