rivenathos wrote:However, my concern continues to be that if a release is really rolling, it should roll with all of the updates. I see this as being a topic that needs to be discussed sometime very soon.
If people pay enough attention to what they are upgrading this is pretty true. But if you do not pay attention a person could update a graphics driver, kernel package, sound driver or such that deprecates their hardware. How much more will this be true when
testing changes from Squeeze to Wheezy and even newer kernels and drivers are available in levels 4 and 5?
People frequently do not always consider what they are doing. Look at how many people have updated the gdm, mint base, and debian graphics packages and were disturbed that their grub, splash screen, desktop and themes had changed. The package descriptions tell you what they do. If you miss this a dialog window pops up during the install which tells you some of your settings are being changed by the new packages and you are given an option to see what the differences are and then accept or reject the change. These are aesthetic changes and not that difficult to fix. Loosing functionality due to kernel or driver changes would be more aggravating and harder to repair for many. It is easy enough to make LMDE '
completely' rolling, go to Update Manager > Edit > Preferences and mark all levels
Visible and
Safe, use Synaptic to select all upgradeable packages, or the terminal applications of apt-get or aptitude to do a dist-upgrade.
Where LM_Ubuntu-base seems intended to hand hold, LMDE does not. (However, I do appreciate that Clem and team has engaged in a lot of hand holding with LMDE, it does make things easier.) I think most consider LMDE to be another edition of LM_Ubuntu-base and expect it to be as newbie friendly. It was only in the last month or so that Broadcom open sourced some of its wireless drivers and they became available in the debian repositories. Before that, for debian, you had to add the non-free repositories or compile drivers from source. Other drivers are only available by compiling. There was a news release in the past few weeks stating that when Squeeze goes stable it will only have the free repositories enabled by default. No proprietary software without some personal involvement by the user.
Many who come to LMDE do not seem to be beyond the point of wanting a rock solid, stable, pre-installed and configured device placed in their hands. Wanting such is ok, just choose your distro accordingly. Debian has three levels: Stable, Testing, and Experimental? Stable is Lenny, for now Squeeze is testing. Whenever Squeeze becomes stable, testing will then be based on Wheezy. Since LMDE is actually based on testing and not Squeeze, the new drivers and kernels will always be present. I do not think any distro can help with the pre-installed and configured part. Although there are a few retailers/resellers of computers with Linux installed, once the user starts updating them even these machines can break.
So, choose how you
roll, just
roll responsibly.
The level four and five updates are not enabled by default because of a greater chance of "breaking" a system. Usually they are along the lines of kernel updates and graphics driver updates. 
