How stable is Debian Unstable?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| I use unstable on my work desktop, my home desktop and laptop and my
| mythtv box.

Sounds encouraging.

| I upgrade haphazardly (sometimes multiple times in a day, sometimes 2
| or 3 weeks apart).

Sounds encouraging.

| The only times I ever had trouble is if I try to upgrade in the middle of
| a major transition (perl 5.12 to 5.14 for example) when not everything
| needed is in the archive yet.  In those cases, I see the long list of
| tings to be removed and think "That looks wrong" and don't upgrade and
| wait a day or two and try again.

Sounds scary.  Do you have to infer that you are in a time of high
sunspot activity, or do you get some kind of notice that an
inattentive ordinary user might pick up on?

It sounds as if you are aware enough that you can avoid or work
through problems.  It would be nice if users were shielded from this
kind of trouble.  I don't generally remember such problems with either
Fedora or Ubuntu (distro's possibly comparable to debian unstable)

| I always use apt-get dist-upgrade.  I know aptitude is supposed to be
| better, but its conflict resolution tends to drive me bonkers with its
| long questions.  I consider synaptic useless.

Interesting.

On Ubuntu, I use "update-manager" (a GUI thing) for
updates; once in a while, I'll use "apt-get update & upgrade" (mostly
when I ssh in).

For adding packages, I've tried but not liked the "Ubuntu Software
Center".  I usually use Synaptic because it lets me explore a bit (but
it is clunky).  I use "apt-get install" if I know exactly what I want.

I don't understand what aptitude is about and haven't been motivated
to find out.  The fact that there is a difference in dependency
handling between apt-get and aptitude is a bit scary.

Note: I don't invest a lot into Ubuntu, I let the distro drive me
where it wants.

Impression: Ubuntu has a lot of users and they trip over a high
percentage of problems that I hit, so often google finds a solution
for me.  But if the problem is deep, Red Hat's ecosystem feels better
at solving it.  Guess: Debian might well be better still (but fixes
might not flow to stable at an observable rate).

| I use xfce these days as both gnome and kde are memory hogs (and gnome
| 3 seems plain useless on top of that).

I use Gnome 3 because I'm not interested in investing in that fight.
But I'm certainly not in love with Gnome 3 or Unity.
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