Re: Re: Understanding the two-year release cycle as a desktop user (and a Debian newcomer)
On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 06:48:21PM +0100, Sam wrote:
> Thanks for your points of view! I agree that Stable comes at a cost, and of
> course if I ever were to set up a server Debian would probably be my choice.
>
> Regarding derivatives, I know about Ubuntu, Mint, etc., but I don't exactly
> like distributions tied to or ultimately dependant on commercial entities (I
> want a change of air after going through Ubuntu, openSUSE...)
>
> I have also seen independent Debian derivatives (MX Linux comes to mind), but
> they either used backports or the Testing distribution.
>
There are literally dozens (hundreds?) of Debian derivatives out there.
You might find that one or another suits your needs better than the
rest: https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census
> I would happily consider using Debian Testing for example, but wherever I see
> someone asking about it I always find someone discouraging from using it due
> to the possibility of having broken or unsecure packages for a long time due
> to it being automated. Is it actually usable for a Workstation? The same would
> apply to Sid, I can no longer allow myself to fix big breakages after broken
> updates (I don't know if that really happens often in Sid)
>
On strategy would be to run testing and not update too frequently. The
important thing there would be to monitor the -user and -devel mailing
lists to ensure that when you do update it isn't in the middle of a
known "trouble spot". The trade there is that you must invest the
effort in keeping up with what is going on at a fairly low level and you
won't be getting timely security support.
The approach that I take is to run stable on my workstations/laptops and
then use chroots, containers, and/or VMs for when I need a "newer"
environment. For instance, I need to run the lintian utility on my
packages before I upload them to the Debian archive. For this to be a
useful check it must be performed with the latest lintian from unstable.
I have an unstable chroot environment which has (among other things)
lintian installed in it at the latest available version so that I have
it always available when I need it. If the environment breaks because
of a bad update or bug in a package or whatever, I have others that I
can use instead. For containers and VMs, taking a snapshot before
upgrading to allow roll-back is trivially easy.
Something similar may work for you.
Regards,
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez
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