Re: Understanding the two-year release cycle as a desktop user (and a Debian newcomer)

[songbird <songbird@anthive.com>]

Sam wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I would like to hear opinions about the release cycle of the Stable Debian 
> releases for a Desktop user. 
>
> I love the Debian ideals and perks (its social contract, independence from big 
> companies...) and understand to a certain extent the fundamentals on why 
> keeping "old-ish" versions of packages with backports and the Shiny new stuff 
> syndrome, but I fail to see how Debian can make a useful desktop distribution 
> with the current release cycle.
>
> For example: My main PC is an already two years old ryzen-based system and a 
> Vega graphics card from 2017, and the kernel used in Stable has regressions 
> which cause complete, unrecoverable system hangups on Vega cards which were 
> not alleviated until kernel 5.3 onwards (and they still keep happening, though 
> rarely!). This means that to ensure stability on a Debian installation I would 
> need a backported kernel, or use Debian Testing or Sid, which IMO collides 
> with the point of a Stable release.
>
> I also see everyday many announcements about performance (GNOME) and usability 
> (KDE Plasma) improvements which are not exactly new features. This is 
> obviously happening on more recent releases, which Debian may not see (unless 
> these changes are also backported, which I would find extremely cumbersome?) 
> until approximately two years have passed since that.
>
> All this makes me think that while Debian is a fantastic distribution, its 
> Desktop, common user-facing side of things would greatly benefit from 
> something like a separate yearly Stable release.

  for those who are willing to put some time into understanding 
how debian works, running debian testing and/or bits of 
unstable can be an acceptable risk.  i do not recommend this to 
just anyone though as once in a while you may have something 
break.

  this is why i also have a separate stable partition for those
rare times when i need it.

  the main issue with running from testing is that during the
freeze running up to the stable release the packages allowed
into testing may pause enough that you aren't being kept as
current as you'd otherwise like.  so during that time i might
pull some things in from unstable as needed.  i don't do this
on many things and i'm trying to be careful about how many
and what so i know what is going on.  mainly i like to keep up
with the most recent firefox releases.

  running etckeeper and git on a system can find out all sorts
of interesting things.  :)

  my other philosophical remarks would be an aside so i will
leave them off.


  songbird