Debian Testing (was: Re: Summary: Which Linux distribution is stable yet up-to-date)

[Omer Zak]

Actually, Debian Testing is a bad alternative when wishing to trade off
stability vs. being up-to-date.

On one hand, while Debian Testing is mostly stable, things break all the
time (and get fixed within few days). Not good when you depend upon a
working system for your work. The worst breakages occur during the first
weeks after Debian Testing goes out of freeze, following a Debian Stable
release.

On the other hand, Debian Testing gets frozen (except for bug fixes) for
several months each two years or so, while a new Debian Stable release
is being made.

The best use case for Debian Testing is for someone who develops (or
adapts) software for running in a Debian installation, and needs to test
it in a live system.

On my current main PC I use Debian Stable (Debian Jessie at the moment),
and until recently I used Debian Testing on a netbook which I use for
lecture notetaking. I learned early in the game not to update packages
on the netbook for few days before lectures and other events, for which
I need notetaking.

--- Omer


On Wed, 2015-12-02 at 15:17 +1100, Amos Shapira wrote:
> I tried to avoid this discussion but I'm a little surprised that
> nobody mentioned Debian Testing.
> I've used it as a desktop for a decade or so and it had a great
> combination of very good stability (i.e. I can't recall it ever
> disappointed me) and still relatively up to date.
> But then again - it's been a while since I used it.
> 
> These days I use Ubuntu LTS for servers and Mac for laptop, and for a
> few months around a year ago also Ubuntu LTS for a work laptop.
> 
> On 2 December 2015 at 06:35, Geoff Shang <geoff at quitelikely.com>
> wrote:
>         On Tue, 1 Dec 2015, Omer Zak wrote:
>         
>                 Yet another option is to use Debian Stable as the host
>                 operating system,
>                 like I did so far, but compile and install my own
>                 kernel builds
>                 according to the instructions in places such as:
>                 http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-building-installing-a-custom-linux-kernel/
>         
>         You can also use Debian Backports to get more recent kernel
>         releases.
>         
>         deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main
>         contrib non-free
>         
>         Here's the most recent kernel in jessie-backports at time of
>         writing:
>         
>         Package: linux-image-4.2.0-0.bpo.1-amd64
>         Source: linux
>         Version: 4.2.6-1~bpo8+1


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