I’m aware of Debian’s reputation for not having the most up-to-date software in its repository but have just noticed that Thunderbird is on its current version. Which makes me ask:
When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?
I’m particularly interested in when it will make available the upcoming major release of GIMP to 3.0.
Yes, it’s a stable distro. Contrary to what most Linux users think, that term only means that the distro is unchanging. That means only necessary updates are released (security fixes for example).
Maybe in the next version, if the gimp release happens soon enough it gets tested.
Just use an external package manager like flatpak to install fresh packages. The only reason I could run MX (Debian) for about a year was because I installed almost every user package through nix, and used Debian ones for the system packages.