this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If you want Debian with more frequent updates, consider going Debian sid. Base Debian is also fine, maybe with Flatpaks for more up-to-date applications where needed.
From your experience is it really unstable ( annoyingly buggy ), or do they just call it that and it stable really ?
Is this a good thing ?
The main “instability” I’ve found with
testingorsidis just that because new packages are added quickly, sometimes you’ll have dependency clashes.Pretty much every time the package manager will take care of keeping things sane and not upgrading a package that will cause any incompatibility.
The main issue is if at some point you decide to install something that has conflicting dependencies with something you already have installed. Those are usually solvable with a little
aptitude-fu as long as there are versions available to sort things out neatly.A better first step to newer packages is probably
stablewithbackportsthough.https://backports.debian.org/
It is very usable, provided you pay attention to major upcoming changes. To give you a very recent example, during May they switched the time libraries to use 64 bits, and like others said, it was dependency hell until the tide of all the packages being recompiled passed. In those cases, unless you know EXACTLY what to do, it's better to wait for updates to come in, let apt sort out what could be updated and what had to wait, and just make sure it doesn't propose you to delete things. After 2 weeks it was all business as usual. Side note: aptitude (my package manager of choice) was unusable, while apt threaded on and pulled me out of the tangle.
I used unstable for years (don't anymore). It broke itself in minor and major ways every couple of months. Maybe it wouldn't boot or X wouldn't start, or the package dependencies were broken and I couldn't install certain packages for a couple of days. Stuff like that.
You will have manually to fix these things from time to time, or do a workaround (like manually downgrading certain packages), or wait a week so stuff gets sorted. Most of the time it works fine though. I imagine the experience is somewhat similar to running arch.
You do not get security fixes, but it's not a massive problem usually, since you'll get the newest version of most software after a couple of days (occasionally longer) after it is released.
Anyway do not recommend unless you want to be a beta tester. I did report bugs sometimes, but almost always by the time I encountered an issue, it was already reported and a fix was already in the works.