On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:29:19PM +0100, Michael C wrote:
Haines Brown wrote:
Michael,
I wanted to put Debian on a new Thinkpad X61s, and to achieve that with
minimal pain, I went with sidux. I created a USB-stick to install it,
and it went as smooth as can be. I'm using the machine with wifi.
All hitches were simply the result of my ignorance. The applications
I've installed (not many so far because I started with only a base
system), work fine. I don't bother with any desktop manager, but use
fluxbox instead.
Thanks,
With Fedora as my current desktop I'm used to ongoing minor breakages,
though from the explanation in Martin Krafft's book Sid, and by
implication sidux, is probably too chaotic a proposition for my
(non-hobbyist) needs.
I have very strong opinions on the use of testing versus unstable for
non-hobbyist needs. First the purpose of testing is just that, to test
the distribution. A testing user should be willing and able to poke
and prod the system looking for and reporting bugs. And that user
should be willing to live with those bugs for an extended period of
time. And be willing to live _without_ particular packages for a
while.
We saw a lot of this late in the game when etch was in testing. Users
would use it for a while, see that it was in pretty good shape but
suffer when a particular bug hung around for a while.
The crucial bit that many miss is that new packages don't move into
testing unless they've sat in unstable with no new bug reports for 10
days (I think). That means that if something breaks in testing,
there's a minimum of 10 days of waiting after the initial bug report
before the bug fix could even think of migrating into testing. If you
throw a couple of other wrenches in the works, you could be looking at
an extended period of breakage. So yeah, testing is more stable than
sid, but could also bite you pretty badly.
Contrast that with sid, bug fixes happen fast. It seems, in my limited
experience, that serious bugs that get caught in sid rapidly
disappear, sometimes within hours. Sure there's more churn and
potentially more opportunities for breakage, but it seems to be pretty
short-lived.
I've run sid on my desktops for about 4 years now (wow! when did that
happen) and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a
serious enough breakage to cause a real problem for my work. And I can
count on one finger the number of breakages that required real work to
get out of (unbootable system...).
I personally wouldn't run a testing system for regular use. I would
run sid or stable (with backports as needed). Of course, YMMV.
.02
A