I'm such a user. Been mostly running on debian/stable since the 90-ies. At work and privately. I cheated when I got a new computer in the beginning of August this year and installed Trixie a couple of weeks before release.

My reasoning is quite simple: I really don't need the latest versions of everything. Were computers useful two years ago? Yeah? OK then, then a computer is obviously useful today with software that is two years old. I'll get the new software eventually, with most of the kinks ironed out. And I've had time to read up on the changes before they just hit me in the face.

Sure, it was a bit painful with hardware support some twenty years ago or so, but I can barely remember the last time that was an issue.

For the very few select pieces of software where stable doesn't quite cut it there's backports, fasttrack and other side channels.

I prefer stable packages on my desktop and laptop, both for professional and for personal use. I hate the current Javascript/Python/Rust bleeding-edge, left-pad, if you haven updated to yesterday’s latest version which breaks compatibility with everything culture.

I like to build things which last. I like to craft a software system and then use it for decades, moving it from machine to machine and intentionally upgrading the components at my pace.

I use Debian Stable on my laptop and workstation. Most packages you don't need newer versions. I don't need the latest version of Gnome or Gedit or whatever.

I don't understand why people like the rigmarole of constantly updating their systems. The only things that come down the wire are security updates.

Installer newer software can be managed. I use the following strategy:

- For Discord / Slack / <something that needs to be the newest>. I can normally use Flatpak.

- Use a third party repo. For Brave, Node and some other things. I use their repository.

- Open source stuff. For smaller stuff that is easy to compile from source e.g. vim / neo-vim I just compile from source so I have the newest versions.

- Python Apps / NPM tooling. I install them in my local user directory.

- Docker is installed in rootless mode.

> On the desktop though they are a bit too stable.

>> You're obviously correct here.

It's neither obvious nor correct, the "stability vs. features" expected is completely subjective. I run Debian Stable on my desktop because I've almost never encountered needing newer versions of anything, and when I did I could usually jump to testing (i.e. the upcoming release) rather than unstable, and even then the next release usually wasn't that far away, so it was still very stable.

As other commenters have pointed out, you can run Debian Sid (unstable), but I'll also agree that if that is what you want long-term then maybe running something like Arch makes more sense anyway.

I'm one of those users, but only because I don't need the be on the bleeding edge.

The only problem I had on Debian 11 desktop was related to the new openssh libraries. I could not install the latest nodes and rubies because 11 had older libraries. However there are workarounds related to providing some environment variables (from memory: some legacy_providers_*) so after a little googling I made them work on my dev machine (and on some old server from a customer of mine.) I'm installing Debian 13 in these days so no more workarounds, for a few years.

Everything else worked fine. I don't install much on this machine: no flatpacks, no appimages, no snaps (I left Ubuntu because of them.) Only debs and docker images. I install languages through their language manager, never through the OS: I could have only one version of them, which is useless. Same about databases. There are hardly two projects on the same language and db version. I could be using LibreOffice and GIMP from 20 years ago: they already had all the features I need.

In my experience, corporate users have moved on to using containers(or VMs) for their development environments.

It's a tricky thing to solve. One the one hand, you don't want your system to stop working due to an update but also want to keep the software you use updated, both in terms of security and functionality.

Mark Shuttleworth talked about this many years ago before snaps were introduced as a solution to this. The idea at the time was that a rolling release distro is too much of a hassle to maintain and even the 6-month cycle was getting to be too much. So he talked about having a stable core with a long release cycle and rolling releases for software that need to be frequently updated, both desktop and server software. The idea was great but the details of the execution left a bitter taste for many users.

I honestly don't understand that change, as most desktops are RAM limited as well, especially as Debian is regularly used for older machines, which aren't supported by Windows 11 anymore.