Long time no see.....

[Ken Moffat]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/11/28 Man-wai Chang <toylet at changmw.com>:
> >> If you say so.  Testing stays more or less current and there's always
> >> unstable.  OTOH, when you have a bunch of customers with Asterisk
> >> servers who scream if their phones aren't working (because phones just
> >> work), conservative and stable is good.
> >>
> >> I have some automated scripts that keep everything up to date, and
> >> having a bunch of different machines complicates things, so I stick to
> >> Debian.
> >
> > I think people should always trust the software developers. If you
> > didn't, you should not have included it. Backporting is less than
> > satisfactory.
> >
> > Does Debian really make it easy to use latest and hottest packages?
> > Unstable?
> >
>
> Hmm! Latest and hottest packages? Not really.
>
> I've been running Debian unstable (sidux) for a couple of years, but
> unstable is fairly slow to adopt anything hot and untested. You would
> need Debian experimental for that, and your customers would not be
> very happy with that choice.
>
> Examples: php 5.3 has been out for some time, but unstable is still at
> 5.2.11. It took many months for kde 4 to appear in unstable.
>
> I'm not aware of any distro that is stable enough for general use that
> offers "latest and hottest " packages. Either you are content with
> dealing with frequent outages, or you step back to "fairly recent and
> usable". Debian unstable (It's really quite stable. I've only
> encountered a couple of glitches in 2 years.) is an excellent choice
> in that category if you can live with frequent updates.
>
> --
> Collins Richey
>     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
>     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.
>
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>


I've been running a debian 'stable' server for several years at home, doing
updates regularly, and it runs flawlessly. Zero problems. But stable is
quite out of date. Perfect for a server... not for (IMHO) home desktops...
office desktop? perhaps. I have a desktop machine running debian testing
that is quite stable. The only problems I have had were updating kernel
versions, when the video sometimes fails. There is usually an easy fix.

As for unstable, I ran that for some time on my desktop, but it seemed to
fail a bit too often during upgrades.

Currently I am running Ubuntu 9.10, which is working so far; seems stable
for desktop usage and packages are quite recent.

-- 
Ken Moffat
kmoffat at modizzle dot net
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