[kijin]

Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS tend to alternate with respect to who has newer packages, because Debian ships on odd years and Ubuntu LTS on even years.

For most purposes, though, I find that I increasingly don't care about 1 or 2 years of difference in the base OS. Most of the toolchain is stable and well established. There are only a small handful of things I want to pin to a specific version (like node.js or Python), but these can usually be installed side by side with default packages. If not, I can always install it in a container. :)