[SlugLUG] Help Me Choose

[Ignacio Solis]

Rohan Sheth wrote:
> What I need help with is deciding testing vs. unstable.

Unstable, hands down.  Unstable doesn't mean it crashes, it means that 
the package pool is unstable because it's constantly changing. Once you 
do an aptitude dist-upgrade your system will not change, so it's up to 
you to decide how "unstable" unstable is.

Unstable doesn't break that often. And when it does people figure it out 
pretty soon. so, if you're a little bit afraid, just log on to #debian 
at freenode or oftc and ask if unstable is broken at the time.  Most of 
the time it's not.

I never check and I've never had anything really go wrong. ... or should 
I say, seriously wrong.  A couple of weeks ago I had to reinstall some 
packages because the init scripts were broken on one update and didn't 
recreate some links for a couple of packages.  Anyway, nothing that 3 
apt commands didn't fix.

Testing doesn't really give you that much. It has more dependency 
problems (cause things get held in unstable) and can potentially break 
like unstable. It's always behind and it's sometimes relatively stale 
(i.e. as we near a release).

Having said that, Ubuntu is not that bad. They also have their unstable 
branch (maybe it's not called unstable), which you can subscribe (apt) to.

> Oh yea, if anyone wishes to know, my reason for not using gentoo this
> time around is that I really really don't want to wait 2 hours for xorg
> to compile =P

2 hours? That was a fast machine :-)

Nacho