Angus Leeming wrote:
> Incidentally, Matej, which Debian flavour do you use?

testing (soon to be stable, but I will probably keep with testing).

> I have a machine 
> running Debian unstable at work and keeping it up to date is, not
> surprisingly, a continual battle.

Unstable is really, well, unstable. With testing I am able to somehow work
over dial-up (that "somehow" is that aptitude update downloads 3MB+ of
data, and that sucks) with occasional taking notebook to some friendly
Internet cafe or university, when I want to actually upgrade (that could be
100MB+ of packages, especially when KDE is upgraded, which was pretty often
this year). If you have broadband at home, then I do not see any problem
with Debian/testing whatsoever. It is just six months of experience but I
have never experienced any hiccup with testing (and I know there were some
with unstable, even though it was kept slightly back, because sarge was
being frozen last year). It may get slightly wilder ride when unstable will
be open wide again and we could get some broken packages into testing --
but then certainly sid will be more broken then it is now as well, so eck
will be still much better choice IMHO.

> Indeed, it would be impractical to use 
> at home. However, Debian stable is, well a little tooooo stable :)

I was able to work with Debian stable until the spring of this year with a
lot of backports <http://www.backports.org> and KDE backports, but when I
got a new computer, I gave up on that and have been using sarge since then,
and it serves me pretty well.

> I quite like the Fedora twice yearly update cycle, but also like Debian's
> "you don't need to reinstall the entire machine, just update the packages
> as and when they are improved".

I do not know anything about Fedora (I gave up on RedHat when it was IIRC
7.0), but ability of Debian people to held whole distribution together so
well as they do never stops to amaze me (and the fact, that I do not have
to hunt packages all over the Internet anymore). And yes I am willing to
pay price in getting slower updates than rest of the world -- when it is
just slightly slower, not woody.

Best,

        Matej

-- 
Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej
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