Bath water … baby ?
I mean, the logical step is to go to Debian sid, which, despite its alternative name unstable, is really not. I’ve been running a gaming rig on it for over a year with nothing more than vey vey minor hiccups, mostly because I’m impatient and run apt full-upgrade frequently.
HDR shines the most on OLED. Pun not intended. 😅
On servers, I agree. OP just wants a recent version of GIMP though. Production can mean many things, and dogmas are never the answer.
You can always use APT Pinning to grab GIMP and its dependencies from testing without touching the rest of the system.
Or you can just run testing or sid as your base system. My gaming rig is based on testing but pulling Mesa and video derivers from experimental and sid and I haven’t had any issues with it. Been running it for about 2 years now this way.
The main “instability” I’ve found with testing or sid is just that because new packages are added quickly, sometimes you’ll have dependency clashes.
Pretty much every time the package manager will take care of keeping things sane and not upgrading a package that will cause any incompatibility.
The main issue is if at some point you decide to install something that has conflicting dependencies with something you already have installed. Those are usually solvable with a little aptitude-fu as long as there are versions available to sort things out neatly.
A better first step to newer packages is probably stable with backports though.
Not much use to go Ubuntu or Mint, unless you have specific issues with Debian that don’t happen with those. Even then, it may be one apt install away from a fix.
If you want to try out BSD, power to you. I wouldn’t experiment on a backup computer though, unless by backup you just mean you want to have the spare hardware and will format it with Debian if you ever need to make it your main computer anyway.
Otherwise, just run Debian!
Stability is no longer an advantage when you are cherry picking from Sid lol.
This makes no sense. When 95% of the system is based on Debian stable, you get pretty much full stability of the base OS. All you need to pull in from the other releases is Mesa and related packages.
Perhaps the kernel as well, but I suspect they’re compiling their own with relevant parameters and features for the SD anyway, so not even that.
Why would they manually package them? Just grab the packages you need from testing or sid. This way you keep the solid Debian stable base OS and still bring in the latest and greatest of the things that matter for gaming.
It will be so fast, you’ll see the results of your commands before you issue them.