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Comment by muppetman | Hacker News Reader

You deal with it by being happy that it doesn't constantly change UI/Interface/Features and break your workflow unexpectedly sometimes. Yes, you don't always have the latest and greatest and if that's a solid requirement, Debian isn't a good choice. But for a stable, not-going-to-change-out-from-under-you point of view, Debian is fantastic. Software you can rely on that's still patched for security issues.

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Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware. My days of using CentOS as a development workstation are thankfully behind me. I will never use a long-release cycle distro for primary development, the headaches that come with it are not worth it.

I use it as a desktop OS on all of my nonserver machines, and it's been great. Obviously, tastes vary, of course.

Depends on the apps. For most it's completely irrelevant whether it’s the latest release. For others, there’s flatpaks or containers (docker/podman). Personally I think people get too attached to bleeding edge.

I use Debian on the desktop with various hardware, both inside the case and outside it (various SDRs and data capture toys) and it works great for me. Just a data point, YMMV.

If you aren't worried about your system being unstable, just use testing. Or just do what everyone else does, and use testing on your laptop/workstation and stable on everything else.

> Debian is really solid as a server OS. I wouldn't use it for desktop unless you're using ancient hardware

I'm running Debian 12 (since the soft freeze I think) on my newly built AMD 7700X. I wouldn't exactly call that "ancient hardware".

Zero issue. No headaches for me. FWIW I'm running Debian since Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11).

I'm dumb :)

Debian releases every 2 years. Each release gets LTS support for 5 years, but there is no reason you need to use it that long unless you choose not to upgrade.

Wait... whaaaaaa!? I thought it was 5 for some reason. Disregard! 2 years is a pretty reasonable lifecycle

Debian 11 works fine on my Framework, I wouldn't call that ancient.

well it's designed to work with linux, which makes it honorary ancient

I mean, if you really need newer software, then you can probably find a DPA (like Ubuntu's PPA). The PHP packages provided by Ondřej Surý come to mind as an example, which have recent versions that would otherwise be unavailable: https://deb.sury.org/

Alternatively, one can use OCI containers (e.g. Docker) for something even more recent, or software unavailable on Debian altogether. That way, you can have a very stable base server OS, with isolated bits of something more recent, feature packed, albeit sometimes a bit more unstable.

Those aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty viable, depending on your use case. Personally, I also didn't see any issues with the ~10 year EOL of some of the RPM distros, as long as you care mostly about security updates/stability and not recent features.

isn't there a testing/"unstable" version that has the latest/greatest? I had heard it was roughly as stable as ubuntu...

unstable is a bit of an odd fit for most purposes. For 6 months leading up to a stable release it is frozen, so few packages are being updated, then for 6 months after a stable release there is a bunch of churn and things can get a bit unstable, and then for about a year it is like running a rolling release, albeit one that isn't as up-to-date as Arch. I feel most people who want up-to-date packages would be better off running Arch or Fedora.

It's "testing", not unstable. "Unstable" is actually unstable, and seems to be where people are actually testing things. I find the names needlessly misleading, although accurate, because "testing" is being tested to be the next "stable." "Unstable" is where people are figuring out things; they go into "testing" when they're pretty much figured out.

I've had an order of magnitude more breakage on regular Ubuntu updates than on Debian testing. That being said, I ditched Ubuntu probably a decade ago and it might go out better now.

Debian Testing doesn’t get security updates quickly, unlike Stable and Unstable. Hence why the Debian wiki does not recommend Testing for ordinary users.

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