Why Wheezy and Not Just Testing? (WAS: Re: Dist-upgrade or upgrade. Which?)
----- Original Message -----
> From: Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com>
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Cc: "debian-user@lists.debian.org" <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
> Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2013 5:03 AM
> Subject: Re: Dist-upgrade or upgrade. Which?
>
> [snip]
>
> As for staying with Wheezy, why? I normally wait 3 - 6 months then switch to the
> new testing. This gives the developers time to fix the teething problems with
> all the new stuff that was held from Wheezy while it was being stabilized. By
> the time Wheezy becomes "stable", the rest of the Linux world has
> moved on.
Why go with Wheezy and not Testing? Already did that. Sort of.
I used to use Fedora (beginning with Core 3 about 8 or 9 years ago), which is pretty much like Testing. I soon tired of Fedora's 6 month release-13 month End of Life cycles, BUT hardware and software were changing fast, and the rapid cycle was needed THEN. On every new version upgrade via clean install (Fedora's in situ upgrade procedure just didn't work--then), it took a couple months tweaking to get everything working well. I use computers in my work, but computers are not my work. I hated the waste of time.
Finally, after putting up with this for a couple of years and to reduce the tweaking time, starting with FC6, I began upgrading only every 3rd release--6 to 9 to 12. This scenerio worked okay, except it lacked a support life longer than 13 months. I needed something with a longer life!
I stayed with F12 almost 2 and a half years past its EOL. I didn't like F15, my next usual upgrade, or the following releases, or the direction Fedora was going. So, I opted against upgrading, but 12 was having problems. Time for a new OS. So, after some research, I decided on Debian mainly for its stability and 5+ year support life which is about the same interval I tend to build a new system. Squeeze, my initial choice, was about as old as F12, so it was out of the running: If I were going to keep the same OS for 5 years, I would need a much newer kernel among other things.
I installed Wheezy Testing a few months ago as a dual boot with F12 to see if it would suit my needs. It has. And it is now my primary OS. Just waiting for it to become Stable. I'll enjoy having a system that just works, and doesn't need periodic tweaking to keep it so.
> Testing is what would be released with most other Linux distros. Unless you need
> the rock-solid stability of stable, i'd recommend spending most of your time
> with testing.
Been there, done that with Fedora. Never again.
>
> On 21/04/13 12:29 AM, Patrick Bartek wrote:
>> I've been using Wheezy 64-bit for several months now, and as
> recommended[1] having been using "dist-upgrade" for upgrading it. My
> sources-list[2] is set to "Wheezy" and not "testing" as per
> those same instructions. When Wheezy is promoted to "Stable" should I
> switch to "apt-get upgrade" instead? Or does it really matter all
> that much?
>>
>> This is my personal system, a desktop, and not a server. I intend to stay
> with Wheezy on this machine for the next 3 to 5 years.
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