Unfortunately, the firmware-amd-graphics package in the Debian non-free archive has not been updated since October 2021. My understanding is that to use AMD GPU hardware released after that point, either the package maintainer will need to update the package with the new firmware from upstream or users will need to get the firmware directly from upstream themselves (as described in this post).
Another way to call "ancient and outdated" software is "stable". But I can understand that if you really need the latest version of a piece of software to get your hardware to work, you will not be satisfied with the "stable" version from last year...
"stable" has multiple meanings, and conflating them leads to a lot of confusion.
In the context of Debian, "stable" means that the software that makes up a given distribution does not change, even as the world — hardware, services, expectations — changes around it.
If you take "stable" to mean "I can use the OS to do my job, even as my hardware, the services I connect to over networks, and my expectations evolve over time", then in my experience a rolling release like Arch Linux works much better.
I've got an Arch Linux server for my email, git, etc that I've done virtually nothing other than package updates to for ~20 years (with two full hardware replacements "out from under the disks" in that time) and it still works as perfectly as it ever did, meanwhile equivalent Debian servers would have needed multiple brittle "upgrade the whole world" updates over the same time period and yet still would have been running ancient outdated software for the majority of that time.
While I’m a fan of Arch Linux, following the mainline kernel closely causes breakages once in a while. I recall some breaking changes in a patch kernel release with mdraid a few years ago, and just recently they broke the Intel GPU in a patch released for recently released hardware (the new framework laptop, among others).
Yup. Arch has an officially supported `linux-lts` package which I use on my server, it's a good choice unless you need a bleeding edge kernel for hardware support etc.
Yeah, there has to be a better way of rolling out hardware support without making the distro unstable for old hardware..
Even with Jammy/Mint I'm having to use mainline installer to get support for a 2022 laptop that would otherwise suffer insufferable keyboard input lag and issues.. Something the Mint community tries to scare people away from.
