It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian. I’m running the latest 7.0.x within a few hours of its release. The build takes about 30-45 minutes depending on how much time I spend on skimming the ChangeLog. YMMV.

I did that for a while because of compatibility issues with a newer laptop, it works but generally if there is no reason it's way easier to stay with the provided packages. Compiling weekly due to security patches becomes annoying over time for no real gain other than the version number

> The build takes about 30-45 minutes

If you don't actually need all the drivers, you can use "make localmodconfig" to substantially reduce that. My local kernels build in 90 seconds on a 32-thread desktop machine :)

The kernel is a lot more stable than people think: I run the daily linux-next on my Debian stable gaming PC to look for bugs, and I don't find very many.

> It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian.

IIRC, Debian has a command called "make-kpkg" which does nearly all the work for you, ending up with a installable package which works identically to the standard Debian kernel packages.

I miss the days when my 486 took about 12 hours to compile a kernel

what about your carbon footprint