It's funny to hear the the name Debian associated with the label "modern." I don't mean to diss Debian, it's a solid distro and has a lot going for it, but it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to.
Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software. And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I wasn't too bothered.
Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.
> it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to.
Are you familiar with branches beyond Stable? I switched from Arch to Debian Unstable (which uses a rolling release) and find their edges to be about equally sharp.
Unstable was always a rolling release, it gets just frozen for some time before each stable release because the process of getting a package in testing requires it to be in unstable first.
How exactly is it behind? I didn't notice it. If you mean it doesn't offer half cooked buggy software for everyday use - I don't call it behind. I'm using Debian testing for regular desktop needs and it's a decent balance of stability and up to date features.
At times I do feel like packaging in Debian lags because of maintainers lack. For example KDE could get packaged faster (there is no Plasma 5 in Debian yet). But usually it catches up if it falls behind.
I guess that I mean, it doesn't offer half cooked buggy software. :-) Well, at least it works about as good as Windows stuff. This is from many years past, so that's the experience that I've had. But as other commenters stated, and I didn't know, the unstable branch is much more current than I would've expected.
Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software. And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I wasn't too bothered.
Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.