Switching from Microsoft Windows to Linux is one of the best decision I ever made.
Thank you to the thousands of Debian volunteers. You are amazing people ❤️
Switching from Microsoft Windows to Linux is one of the best decision I ever made.
Thank you to the thousands of Debian volunteers. You are amazing people ❤️
Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver? I really enjoy debian as a kind of “default” Linux but the rare updates and the need to upgrade the whole system when a major update hits annoys me, so rolling release feels better, but I’m worried Debian Testing is unstable? But I’ve heard it’s not so bad? Anyone got any opinion on that?
Daily driver here. Stable for servers, testing for workstations.
Debian Testing isn’t as stable as Stable, but has been far more reliable than anyone else’s desktop releases. I’m also not a fan of Fedora and others’ policy of ending support on the day of a new release.
If for some reason you decide to hold back on an upgrade of Testing, you’ve still got five years of patch support coming. And if I do want to live on the bleeding edge, there’s always Sid (also called Unstable). That’s where you’ll run into the kind of instability you can expect from a rolling release.
My favorite will probably always be Gentoo, but I don’t always have time for that hobby.
I’m not a fan of fedora too I have to agree with you
Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s
Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.
So what distro do you use? I definitely am also including gaming in the considerations.
Juat wanted to chip in and say that PikaOS is a gaming specific OS based on Debian Testing. Been running it the last couple of months and been enjoying the heck out of it! https://wiki.pika-os.com/en/home
Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.
Yeah, if you really want a taste of Debian desktop, LMDE is probably where I’d start.
Yep, been driving it for like 2 years on my study laptops. Only ever ran into a single issue that made the laptop unusable which was Tailscale DNS conflicting with the system’s DNS (been a while so don’t remember the exact details).
If you don’t need the latest stuff, aren’t doing anything needing the latest drivers and don’t really mess around with the shipped packages, it’s excellent for just working and being reliable.
Not me, i just use Stable Debian.
I only Put Debian Stable on Computers I will rarely use. I wouldn’t use Debian on a Gaming pc, I would prefer a rolling release (Arch based) Or fix release every 6 months
It’s sometimes unstable. But sometimes it’s mostly stable.
testing, stable, oldstable, etc are pointers to named branches (named after Toy Story characters BTW). Unstable is also a pointer but it always points to sid (the neighbour kid that breaks the toys).
Testing isn’t a rolling release. Yesterday testing pointed to trixie. Today stable points to trixie (because testing was completed and trixie has been “released”) and testing now points to forky which is a new branch that is basically a copy of unstable. They’ll do testing on forky and fix things and eventually stable will be pointed at forky (which will be Debian 14) and they’ll make a new testing branch called something else.
It’s an odd thing to call things “released” on a project that’s done openly. Debian 13 was just released today, but you can install what will be Debian 14 right now long before it’s released by installing forky. You can also contribute to their testing by submitting bug reports. But if you do install forky (testing) today, don’t be too disappointed if there’s a bunch of things broken because it’s the same as unstable right now. It will get more reliable as things are fixed and eventually be considered as stable. When Debian 14 is “released” you won’t need to upgrade anything if you’re on forky because you’ll have already been on it for a year or more.
But yeah, unstable is unstable, it’s just somewhere people can chuck packages on and experiment. Things will break there. Testing is testing, it’s there if you want to help out with testing. And stable is stable, you get that if you want something reliable and you don’t want to mess around with software occasionally breaking and having to track down what broke and submit bug reports.