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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Or run Debian Sid, as you ought to on the desktop ;).

Debian testing would make a much better choice on the desktop for anyone not actively trying to help Debian development by trying bleeding-edge packages and filing bugs. Run Debian sid if you don't mind encountering breakage and filing bugs, for the benefit of the users of testing who then won't have to deal with the buggy packages you did. :)

These bugs range in severity from "inkscape becoming the default PDF viewer" to "file conflict prevents installing a package" to "libc6 lacks the /lib64 symlink and now no dynamically linked programs on the system can run", and everything in between. Fortunately, the "break the whole system" bugs don't happen often, but still: don't run sid unless you want to help filter out breakage for others by hitting it yourself.

True. The new intel drivers compiles fine with Sid, while not with Squeeze. Will test tonite. Regards.

Still more stable than half the other distributions out there

[citation needed] generally people who say this haven't actually tried sid or "other distributions"

I know that the plural of anecdotes is not data, but I currently run Sid, and I have been for several years. It hasn't been problem free, but I don't recall a system-killing update. The most common problem is some missing or broken dependencies for a package forcing me to hold off installing a package or updating my system for a few days.

In the mean time, back when I used to live with someone who used Ubuntu as his main system, and when I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop, I had to fix system-crippling bugs at least 3 times.

So, anecdotally, I've had less system-killing problems with Sid than Ubuntu's stable releases.

When it comes to system-killing bugs, it also matters whether you update daily or less often; system-killing bugs often get reported right after a mirror pulse and fixed one or two mirror pulses later (less than a day).

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