On Friday, 24 January 2014 at 16:14:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 06:01:33AM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
While Linux isn't my primary desktop system, the desktop Linux
stuff
I do work with has gone from Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint.
I left Ubuntu because Canonical was starting to piss me off,
partly
because of their apparent obsession with being basically just
an OSX
clone. So I went upstream to Debian. Still run Debian on my
server,
but I abandoned it as a desktop OS partly because so much of
it is
out of date literally before they even release it, and also
because
once they do get a newer version of something, there's a fair
chance
you can't actually get it without upgrading the whole OS
because not
everything actually gets into backports
[...]
You should just run off Debian/unstable (or if you're chicken,
testing).
I do. In spite of the name, it's actually already as stable as
your
typical desktop OS with its typical occasional random breakage.
Stable
is really for those people who are running mission critical
servers that
when the OS dies, people die. That's why it's always "out of
date", 'cos
everything must be tested thoroughly first. For desktop users
you don't
need that kind of stability, and generally you don't want to
wait that
long to get software upgrades. So just use unstable or testing.
I've
been living off unstable for almost 15 years and have only had
1 or 2
occasions when things broke in a major way. That's saying a lot
considering how many times I've had to reformat and reinstall
Windows
(supposedly a stable release version!) back when I was still
stuck using
it.
T
The thing with stability is, it's meaningless without context.
The only thing that has meaning is stability in the face of a
particular workload.
Mission critical servers tend to have very static requirements. A
power-user's desktop has very dynamic requirements. Debian stable
will be more "stable" for the server, but the same is not
necessarily true for the desktop.
