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Comment by idoubtit | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy user of another rolling release distribution: Debian testing. It's on my desktop and a laptop for a decade (even more for the desktop since I transferred the OS from my previous desktop pc).

I can't remember any problem during the upgrades of the recent years. I often apply partial updates through `aptitude` on a weekly basis, and full upgrades once in a while (maybe monthly). There were some rough times long ago, but I think it was related to the transition from initrc to systemd: for a major change like this, it's would be surprising if a testing release was perfect.

I don't think I ever had problems as acute as having no Xorg or alsa. If several occurrences of this kind had occurred, I would call my OS unstable.

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Another Debian unstable user. It's hard to remember the exact installation date, but I have a `/var/log/firewalld.1` from Aug 25 2002. So, 20 years soon! And it has been migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit.

If you used d-i to install, it would have left logs in /var/log/installer/

Also, the installation-birthday package can figure out your installation's birthday.

No /var/log/installer (maybe it was not the case for Woody?) and installation-birthday says 2006 but this is the date of the cross-upgrade to amd64 (using debootstrap).

Maybe the filesystem or LVM/RAID creation date would give a better birthday. Also, these days one can cross-grade between architectures without using debootstrap, just apt.

https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading

Unfortunately, I migrated to LVM later (I think 2006 too), through a new disk (I suppose with tar | tar). At the time, amd64 was just a port.

I use sid/unstable, and like you I use aptitude, partially out of habit. I used to use stable exclusively. About a year ago I decided to try using sid permanently. I only ever had one issue (couldn't login to a gui), but that was resolved during the next update. It feels almost as stable as Debian stable, and I see no reason to try out something like arch or manjaro.

Debian unstable running here since about 7 years. I tend to reinstall when getting a new computer. Once I had X break and I had to set "GDK_BACKEND=x11" and "XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11" to fix it. Something related to Wayland I guess. But I use startx directly, no login manager, so probably not a common issue.

Sometime more than five years ago, there was some trouble always when a new version of GNOME trickled to unstable one package at a time and having part of packages the old version and part new caused a lot of small issues, like thumbnails not working in Nautilus etc.

I don't remember any other relevant issues. apt-listbugs helps avoid a lot of issues. I use aptitude as package manager (commands, not the menu UI) and often use "aptitude forbid-version" to skip a bad version, not sure if apt-get or apt these days provide something similar. apt-listchanges is nice too, although I rarely see something relevant to me specifically there.

Me too! I do unattended-upgrades 4 times daily. I also auto-upgrade packages to unstable when there are security updates that didn't reach testing yet.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Best_practices_for_Tes...

I do it 5 times daily

The Debian archive is only updated 4 times daily, so one of those 5 times will do nothing.

Another Debian testing user reporting in. I think I’ve reinstalled once or twice in a decade.

Debian unstable is equally functional on desktops. 15 years without having to reinstall.

It's even better (to use unstable) since you don't have disappearing packages, you have access to packages only in unstable (Firefox instead of Firefox ESR), and you get timely security update.

20 years ago, things may break a lot in unstable. But nowadays, you just have to be careful to only use "apt upgrade" and from time to time "apt full-upgrade" (and check what is removed as it could remove everything).

You can also pin most packages to testing, but allow packages from unstable/experimental to be installed but pinned at lower priority and also pin security updates from unstable at a higher priority. I think this approach is the best of both worlds.

This seems overly complicated. Nowadays, unstable almost never break (with the exception of files migrating from one package to another without the proper metadata) and I am updating daily. I am curious, are you using testing or unstable?

I am using primarily testing, but some packages from unstable due to security updates or where the package got autoremoved from unstable due to release-critical bugs, which happens quite often. It feels a little more comfortable using testing, knowing that I don't hit any bugs piuparts/etc blocks from entering testing. I think I initially downgraded to testing to avoid dealing with unfinished transitions, which make upgrades a bit more annoying.

I’ve been running Debian stable for about 10 years and reinstalling every so often. How do you run a partial upgrade on testing? Is it usable as a daily driver?

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