Have you tried Mepis? It is a very good distro based on Debian stable. I've used the Mepis repos with Debian stable on many occasions. Not everything can be backported due to incompatibility issues, such as upgrading gtk to get upgraded Gimp, but many other upgraded packages are available.

That would be an LTS with an optional rolling release backport system, which will lead to all kinds of problems, especially when the backports need newer core components than the LTS has in its repositories. That is the reason why you don't see such a thing with distros with a large repository (like Debian or Ubuntu). For some applications you may have at least a part of updated software, like Slackware in combination with AlienBobs KTown repository for new KDE versions.

Yes Mepis was my first distro. I started with 8.5 and them moved to 11. The new release was taking forever and the various backports broke the system so it ended up being too old and unstable.

Michel

Why is it possible for W$ and Mac OSX to keep their applications uptodate with the same OS?

Michel

I can't speak for W$, but with Mac OSX, it's only Apple's apps that stay up-to-date with the OS. Third party apps, not necessarily so. There's newer third-party software that I can't run because I won't update past Mac OSX 10.6.8. And Apple has a very vested interest, for the most part, in keeping older versions of OSX updated with their proprietary apps. Also, being based on BSD, things are handled differently than with Linux — app packaging is much like it is with PC-BSD. And, Mac OSX software updates only update Mac OSX/Apple apps, not third party apps. Linux is (mostly) awesome in that aspect — everything is updated.

At first, you won't have the same core OS on Windows (not an OS X user, so can't comment here), Windows 7 has different core components than Windows 7 Service Pack 1, they switch even kernel versions. This usually doesn't happen on non-rolling-release Linux distributions, but especially not on LTS distributions. Also, on Windows it is more common that applications come with all their dependencies in the same package, so that dependency problems won't happen, but with the downside that you have to maintain more than one installation of the same software. This very rarely is the case on Linux.

It is just that both things that you want (stability and bleeding edge) are not really compatible, especially on distros with very large repositories, where testing the of interoperability of all the packages is very time consuming. There is a good reason why distributions that are considered stable and have a large repository (like Debian) have very long development cycles. Even stable distros with small repository (like Slackware) need a good amount of testing before the next version can be released. If you want something that has a somewhat short development cycle and can be considered as somewhat stable maybe you should look at openSuse instead.

I'm also a Mac user and yes when I upgraded to OSX 10.7 some applications would not work anymore but I could still run Adobe suite 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 and that's quite a spread and that spread is true with most third party applications and they work without a glitch practically for nearly a four to five year period including maybe one OS update.

Michel

Windows 7 was pain in that it showed that M$ could deliver a stable OS if it wanted to and you can run office 2003 or office 2013 on the same OS. I understand the issue with repositories but that is also one of the weakness of Linux. Hundreds of distros with two main different executables and around five main desktops. Yes this is also why I like Linux but maybe the community is spreading itself too fine and at the same time, limiting the possibility of getting consistent third party support.

Michel