Maybe someone can shed some light on this. Is 5.3.1 better than 5.1.1? I've been hearing people migrating back to work with 5.1.1 Confuses me on which one people should begin with.

Any opinions?
I found 5.1.1 very stable if you avoid a few gotchas (ran 6mo w/o reboot).
OTOH 5.3.1 has already taken a dive twice (on a P2 and on a Xeon HT with ECC RAM)
when KDE 3.5.9 (or X?) got stuck during alt-tab and I had to ctrl-alt-backspace out of X losing
all open work.
KDE 3.5.9 printing has died twice (OO would still print, but not kwrite)
KDE 3.5.9 got stuck changing themes and would no longer start konqueror.

5.1.1 was not perfect - OpenOffice killed KDE (X?) frequently, so one would have to upgrade that.
Kalarm often crashed KDE (but the maintainer has a fixed version).
Dragging tabs in Firefox crashed KDE (hardlocked once dragging to 2nd window IIRC) in 5.1.1
5.1.1's LVM died when an external USB drive w LVM2 did a random disconnect -
my other external HD's LVMs all got disconnected too! LVM froze!
but 5.3.1 is still changing external HD path (sda1->sdb1, sda2->sdb2) on momentary disconnects, so that is not fixed yet. (USB drops for split second, even with 2 head usb cable, usually during an rsync backup.)
This has happened repeatably with 3 drives on 3 machines - not rare on 5.1.1 or 5.3.1. Flash drives & HD's.
All 3 drives had already passed mke2fs -cc torture tests w no disconnect on plain USB cables.

5.1.1 will not make a useable persistent image file - apt will fail early and often.
(5.3.1 puts lots of copies of the .wh. tree on the image - make the image file twice the size you need)
5.1.1 seems to leak memory, so use a 4G swap if you don't reboot often.
It fragments RAM, so you need at least 750M ram if you don't reboot often.
5.1.1 has many security patches to do for kernel & X - not easy.

Making a new custom minirt.gz for 5.1.1 is easy.
I have 20+ failed minirt.gz for 5.3.1, zero working - even just touch a file and it won't load.
(I did a chroot, followed the howto's etc.)

If etch-backports has what you need, and you don't need support for new hardware, 5.1.1 can be good.
I feel stuck with too many packages too many versions back.
5.3.1 is not trouble-free in this regard - some updates drag in 30+ other updates unless you
guess the right sequence to apt-get

Which to use? I guess it depends on your needs.
Charles