[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“I was listening to the GNOME press conference several hours
late when the announcement came in over e-mail that Debian had
finally declared version 2.2 (Potato) stable. Knowing there would
be a stampede for the servers in short order I opened an xterm and
typed apt-get update, watched the output to see if any of the
source archives had changed, and then typed apt-get upgrade.”
“I was rewarded with a quick download and the installation of a
shiny, new, fixed version of the mailx package. I went back to work
on my newly stable Debian box. The Debian changelog for mailx
mentioned that a security tweak had been made. I felt safer and
stable. From frozen to full-blown Potato in the time it took to
snag a package.”
“Pretty anticlimactic stuff, when it comes down to it, and
therein lies one of the strengths of Debian GNU/Linux. The
project moves forward at a seemingly ponderous pace, but a little
time spent reading through the myriad developer and user lists
reveals a disarmingly feverish quest for perfection. Its advocates
often position it contra everybody else as a distribution wholly
disinterested in the latest and greatest, and its deriders bring up
just that fact when ticking off reasons they prefer to stick with
what they have.“