I'm always stoked for new releases of Ubuntu even though I don't really use them much at all (except on servers). Is there any real reason to keep up a release cycle like theirs when you can just update the apt repositories?
Consistent support without worrying about major changes in versions of software you depend on.
Especially for the LTS releases, you want to be able to get security fixes without wondering if there's some backwards-incompatible change to stuff you use.
Is there any major Linux distro that doesn't use a release cycle of some sort? If there is, you'd have to be mad to use it for production environments.
For desktop users it fits a decent niche, and I tend to recommend it, even though I use Debian myself. Debian stable tends to have things too out of date by the end of a release cycle for most desktop users' tastes (though that can be partially addressed via the backports repository). You can get the always-current version by tracking unstable, which doesn't actually break as much as the name implies, but it does have dependency issues relatively frequently. If you aren't comfortable doing dependency resolution in aptitude, it isn't the best choice imo. Having checkpointed releases mitigates most of the upgrade-conflicts issues, because various upgrade paths are usually tested to make sure the default apt dependency resolution does the right thing with them (Debian stable does this upgrade-path testing very thoroughly between releases, but Ubuntu at least does some of it).
I'm always stoked for new releases of Ubuntu even though I don't really use them much at all (except on servers). Is there any real reason to keep up a release cycle like theirs when you can just update the apt repositories?