There's a six-hour old reddit thread[0] on this article with comments from (mostly) Australians in /r/australia, for the interested. It may provide additional context and opinions, although I'm sure you can imagine what the overwhelming opinion is going to be.
I believe the parent meant that it's not a bad idea to reevaluate the usage of any software that is business-critical and may have similar repercussions should your license to use it expire.
I don't / wouldn't do that simply because my handwriting pushes the boundaries of the word 'atrocious'. I'd imagine others who spend the majority of their time using computers are in the same boat.
> Yes I know you can mitigate this with LTS but that's a big compromise.
Genuine question as a Ubuntu user, where do you win using Debian on a laptop? I totally understand using it on servers, as it is the definition of 'rock solid' and you can ensure that it will work 100% of the time.
Admittedly I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the differences, but isn't using Ubuntu LTS compromising in the same way as Debian stable? Specifically, packages are oriented for stability. Consequently, you don't get improvements to the kernel, or other packages you may use frequently. On my laptop, I don't want to use Kernel 3.6 that doesn't have the latest improvements to work with Intel processors, direct rendering management, and power saving. I don't particularly want to use quite outdated versions of GNOME either. Six months, to me, is a solid amount of time to sit on a release.
Some people suggest (misguidedly, according to Debian volunteers) using Unstable on a workstation / laptop, which caused my system to outright break entirely because I was using a Nvidia graphics card, so I just installed Ubuntu and it worked from first boot.
Using testing is sworn against by almost everybody, as it's the worst of both worlds - it's not stable and it's not fixed quickly.
Stable plus backports, suggested elsewhere in these comments, sounds nice only if you consider ensuring that water drains out of each hole in a colander equally an adequate use of your time. You then have what I'm fairly sure it's explicitly listed as "don't do this" on the DontBreakDebian[0] page.
In my considerable experience using Office on Mac in tandem with Office on Windows, the Mac experience is severely, severely degraded in comparison.
Extreme slowdowns in large documents, odd crashes, and difficulties handling macros are pretty much the defining experience for Office 365 on Mac for me.