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I have been a debian/unstable user for ten years on my workstations and laptops. During that time I have rarely experienced any problems. With the addition of the experimental repository there are rarely if ever any issues. The easiest way to avoid troubles in unstable is the installation of apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs.

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And then just perusing anything that shows up in listbugs before an update? Hopefully problems would be noticeable without having to sift through tons of reports. I've never used that before. It's astonishing how many bugs there are in Ubuntu, yet they still release it. They have tended to get them fairly well settled over a span of time, though, after a release. But right now, I'm very happy to be back in Debian stable. It does feel like home. Well, much less cluttered than home, actually. ;)

Perusing sounds a little more involved than what the process actually entails. Its not a list of all bugs; its a list of bugs found in the version you are about to upgrade to. That means there are rarely more than one or two bugs. Most of the time its pretty easy to tell if the bug is relevant and if it is you can just pin the package to the old version, restart apt-get and upgrade away. Definitely worth checking out.

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