OSNews

Syntaxis, you seem to have an odd emotional attachment to Debian.

This is not difficult:

Woody installs with versions of popular open source software that are several iterations behind other Linux distributions. That's a fact.

Some of these applications are available from independent developers, outside the official Debian project.. There is no guarantee that Backport A won't conflict with Backport B. And, obviously, Debians stable tree doesn't track these backports. That's a fact.

There are no Debian security updates for backports, as well as testing and unstable. If you want to maintain that famous Debian reliability and security, you have to stay with the Debian stable tree. That's a fact.

Woody's selling point is security and reliability. In return, you get older apps and an old display. If you think that's a fair trade off, fine. But, if someone wants Woody-level stability and reliability and the ability to rely exclusively on official Debian updates and Debian security patches and at the same time run the current version of XFree86 plus Gnome or KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc., they can't.

If you know about a site that offers instructions in how to upgrade Woody -- using official Debian sources -- to XFree86 4.3, KDE 3.1.4/Gnome 2.4/xfce 4/, Mozilla 1.5, and OpenOffice 1.1 please let us know.

Now, as for your suppositions about what corporate workers would or would not use on their desktops, please let us know why an average employee would choose Woody if the alternatives included OS X or XP. Not what an T department would choose if they incorrectly thought they're only imperative was to cut costs, but what the users would choose.