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You are presuming to tell *me* what matters to my customers, and to me as an admin? Careful. I'm the one with the experience in this particular area. (Or please present your credentials.) You don't have to deal with the user complaints about, for example, how certain business critical PDF's won't open in or print from Evince when you know that the latest version can handle it.

And just try apt-get'ing Evince from testing. It will destroy your Debian system.

It is possible to use a distro with a long release cycle, like CentOS. We've done it. But compared to what we are using now, the long release cycle distros are more pain than gain for corporate desktop use. And Debian has the longest release cycle of them all. With unpredictability thrown in just to make it even more appealing.

Edit: In the interest of fairness, I should note that as of RHEL6, Red Hat's release cycle has become even less predictable than Debian's. Which also affects CentOS, of course. Though one can't blame the CentOS guys for that.

Edited 2009-07-29 17:23 UTC

Creating select backports isn't terrible complicated.

Just curious, but why don't you just use Acrobat Reader then in a corporate environment if .pdf's matter that much.
Seems worth it getting the proper 'original' app for this, or was it just and example and not really the only issue.
Myself, I can't find anythin wrong with a two year old system that's still receiving security updates, but then I'm a home user. Lenny is the most stable/solid I've tried though in recent months with absolutely everything working fine (even wireless and with added kernel modules for Vbox and vmware) being the smoothest experience ever, and I thought that would count for something in the business world too?

oh teh noes, a few applications cause you to need to have regular operatingsystem wide release schedules... no offense, but i think im beginning to understand your issues a little bit better