Re: Which release

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw@iprimus.com.au>]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Fre, 2003-09-05 at 19:53, Joey Harrison wrote:
>
> > My
> > preference would be to have the most recent packages,
> > but also somewhat tested, so should I use testing? 
>
>
> I'v run stable, testing and unstable. In you case, I would start with
> stable. Most software in Linux is so mature these days that it doesn't
> really matter if it's all that recent for the most part. Desktop
> environments (Gnome, KDE) are an exception, but you can get good
> (unofficial) backports to stable at http://www.apt-get.org
>
> You should also consider Libranet, it's a commercial distro based on
> Debian, with a friendlier installer and more recent packages than
> stable.
>
> Avoid testing!! Testing is for testing /the distribution/ and is quite
> f****d most of the time, as packages trickle in from unstable in a quite
> random manner. E.g., Gnome in testing is severely broekn, since some
> packages of 2.2 are in testing, but other important packages are helb ub
> by bugs.

If you use a lighter wm such as icewm, then there's no problem at all
with testing. I'd recommend that because there's less changing and less
chance of system breaks as with unstable. You can install single packages
from unstable easily too.

> Unstable is ok, it's not so much the packages that are unstable, but the
> package list changes frequently....