Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

But, hardware is different. A more stable, well-tested kernel that FAILS to actually WORK AT ALL on my hardware isn't an alternative. *EVEN* if I highly value stability over new bleeding-edge features.

I totally hear you. Maybe the Debian guys will too; they could possibly include a linux-experimental tree (probably just pulled from Testing) in an otherwise-Stable distribution. Or, I suppose some other entity could do a boot CD of Debian Stable + the kernel from Testing or Unstable. But they'd have to maintain a separate repository for kernel updates, or else your shiny new system would probably fail after the first kernel patch in the Stable tree. It'd be an ongoing project, not just a one-off thing, and you could potentially run into some real snarls with dependencies from Testing also needing a backport. Sometimes, pulling a Testing kernel back to Stable can be pretty painful.

I don't speak for Debian, but as an outsider, it seems like people with cutting-edge hardware just aren't the target market. It feels to me that their goal is serving people who value stability enough to custom-choose their hardware to get it. To a professional-level mindset, you pick your software FIRST, and then you get the hardware that best suits your performance and budget needs. You don't buy your software to go with your hardware; that's buying a suit to match a tie. The software's the important bit; the hardware is just the method of getting the software to the place you want it.

If you're buying whatever's on sale at Best Buy, a super-reliable distro probably isn't what you want anyway, since the hardware on those machines tends to be so awful. The risk of hardware failure is so high that the increased reliability in using Debian over Ubuntu will be largely irrelevant.

Honestly, it's not like Ubuntu is terrible, you know. It's pretty solid. You're probably not going to run into any serious bugs that will mess you up, and they seem pretty responsive to problem reports, if you do a good one.

I guess... Debian is for people who fear system failure, and plan accordingly. If you're not actively afraid of what will happen if your computer crashes, Ubuntu's probably fine.