"It seems that the Debian team doesn't like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name 'Etch') released last year, the next Debian release (code name 'Lenny') will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: 'For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.'

"Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4..."

9 Reasons that make Debian preferred Distro for Linux Device Developers. This post describes a comprensive list of why a Device Developer prefer Debian Linux distro to make their softwares.

This is not a rant about Debian vs. Ubuntu. I used both, loved both, and I'm currently using Debian Lenny. It's not about Debian versus any other distribution either: in fact, I only tried a few other distros, and most of them were Debian-based. Here are the top 10 reasons for which I enjoy using Debian:

"The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny..."

I'm hammering away in Debian Lenny right now, and I can pretty much say that it does what I need it to do.

"...Debian Lenny might be called the 'testing' version but I find it stable enough to be used every day as your main OS. The rough edges make it an excellent distribution for the real geek, the computer user that finds that other distributions are either to polished (Ubuntu, SuSe) or too rough (Gentoo, Slackware)..."

"Now it’s finally official: the Asus EeePC (for Easy to Learn, Work, and Play) will be available from December in Germany and Austria for a recommended end user price of €299,- including tax. [...] The good news? Debian developer Ben Armstrong has realized that this is the perfect text editing device for himself and his wife, bought two of them, and is currently porting Debian to it! ..."

"In the past few months in the Debian-EeePC team, a number of interesting things have been happening. [...] Thanks to the efforts of numerous users and developers who are being added to our ranks daily, we expect by the time Lenny releases we will be well on our way to providing a pure Debian solution for the Eee. Whether or not everything needed for the Eee is in Lenny at that time remains to be seen. We need to allow for how long it takes to get new drivers into the kernel. But if we miss the release, we will certainly provide backports and look forward to full support in the following release."

Device drivers can make or break an operating system. The best engineered kernel is useless if applications running on it cannot interface with the outside world or if device manufacturers cannot readily support it with their wares.