OSNews

First of all, I would like to see "unstable" renamed to something like "actively being updated", preferably in a single word. Debian unstable is not at all unstable in the sense of system or program crashes - it is just that things can noticably change when the system is updated. As a caveat, things do break periodically on updates, usually trivially, sometimes in a major way (two major examples come to mind - one involved a problem with PAM that prevented logins and required booting into single-user mode to fix, another was a typo for the C++ lib that prevented all C++ programs from running). The functionalilty of Debian unstable as a desktop is certainly there - this is posted from KDE 3.1.4 with a 2.6.0-test7 kernel, GCC 3.3.2, etc. It does require some knowledge to fix occasional problems. For corporate use, it would be possible to take a snapshot of unstable, test it, roll it out, and carefully control any updates - probably more work than most places would want, but certainly possible. Anyway, my point is that Debian can be a great desktop.

Regarding the installer - I have no experience with Anaconda, but the single greatest focus for the next Debian release has been a new installer. AFAIK, it is essentially finished for x86 but not for all of the other architectures. I strongly doubt that Debian will abandon all of this work to adopt Red Hat's installer.