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> Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get one package ... [means] ...instability... Just curious, have you really experien

> Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get one package ... [means] ...instability... Just curious, have you really experienced instability by installing all updates on any mainstream distro? If so, could you share what happened? I've not had that experience but would like to know about it.

acabal 15y ago
Yes. For example when Ubuntu switched to Pulseaudio, it borked my sound. Even with the release after that one (can't remember which one it was), I had to have a shortcut on my desktop for 'killall pulseaudio' because just playing music for more than 15 minutes would end up in garbled sound. Or in Karmic, when a regression in the Intel video drivers made even dragging windows stutter on my laptop with 4GB of RAM. Or when Lucid broke hibernate for my laptop. It was fixed in Maverick, then broke again in Natty. Literally every distro upgrade of Ubuntu for me has resulted in more than one serious regression in something that used to work.
- wazoox 15y ago
  Ubuntu and Fedora, though the most common desktop distros, also are notoriously NOT very stable. Fedora is RedHat beta-test playground, and Ubuntu is built from a Debian-unstable snapshot. OTOH many people complains that Debian, RedHat or CentOS are too long to implement the latest features, but this is the price to pay for extreme reliability. Know your needs, choose accordingly.
  - shadowfox 15y ago
    I just wish there was a middle ground though where you dont have to choose between extreme reliability + years of waiting and fast turnaround + notorious instability
    - wazoox 15y ago
      Debian testing is both reliable enough (I think there were no more than 2 cases when an upgrade would lead to an unusable state in the past 8 years) and not too far behind the bleeding edge. Or you could use a rolling release distro such as gentoo, arch, or in a related world FreeBSD.
      - danieldk 15y ago
        The problem with Debian Testing is that once something breaks badly, you usually have to wait two weeks until it is fixed, because changes need to trickle down from Sid. In my experience, Sid is more useful as a desktop. But it's certainly not for the beginner.
    - dredmorbius 15y ago
      For desktops: Debian testing + pinning as needed to backports, sid, and experimental. For servers: Debian stable + backports. That last in particular is vastly preferable on servers to the usual "Oh, we've got to run Red Hat because it's industry standard, but we're going to have to rip out the guts and install a metric shit-ton of third-part / roll-your own / nonstandard packages, and then hope that the poor third-generation admin to inherit this cesspit can make heads or tails of it.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Since my favorite Debian combo was already mentioned, I should mention my usual plan-B: CentOS with CentOS Plus enabled on the server. What flavor of Unix you run on the desktop is irrelevant, although I frequently find myself in dependency hell when I am working on a Mac. Installing the qtconsole version of iPython is next to impossible.
- deleted 15y ago
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shadowfox 15y ago
It has happened to me once in a while. In fact my full upgrade to (k)ubuntu 11.04 ended up leaving the machine in a unbootable state. Not a big deal since I had data backups. But still time consuming.
pointyhat 15y ago
+1 here. mysql-server is compltely broken in 10.04LTS.
deleted 15y ago
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acabal 15y ago

Yes. For example when Ubuntu switched to Pulseaudio, it borked my sound. Even with the release after that one (can't remember which one it was), I had to have a shortcut on my desktop for 'killall pulseaudio' because just playing music for more than 15 minutes would end up in garbled sound. Or in Karmic, when a regression in the Intel video drivers made even dragging windows stutter on my laptop with 4GB of RAM. Or when Lucid broke hibernate for my laptop. It was fixed in Maverick, then broke again in Natty. Literally every distro upgrade of Ubuntu for me has resulted in more than one serious regression in something that used to work.

wazoox 15y ago
Ubuntu and Fedora, though the most common desktop distros, also are notoriously NOT very stable. Fedora is RedHat beta-test playground, and Ubuntu is built from a Debian-unstable snapshot. OTOH many people complains that Debian, RedHat or CentOS are too long to implement the latest features, but this is the price to pay for extreme reliability. Know your needs, choose accordingly.
- shadowfox 15y ago
  I just wish there was a middle ground though where you dont have to choose between extreme reliability + years of waiting and fast turnaround + notorious instability
  - wazoox 15y ago
    Debian testing is both reliable enough (I think there were no more than 2 cases when an upgrade would lead to an unusable state in the past 8 years) and not too far behind the bleeding edge. Or you could use a rolling release distro such as gentoo, arch, or in a related world FreeBSD.
    - danieldk 15y ago
      The problem with Debian Testing is that once something breaks badly, you usually have to wait two weeks until it is fixed, because changes need to trickle down from Sid. In my experience, Sid is more useful as a desktop. But it's certainly not for the beginner.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    For desktops: Debian testing + pinning as needed to backports, sid, and experimental. For servers: Debian stable + backports. That last in particular is vastly preferable on servers to the usual "Oh, we've got to run Red Hat because it's industry standard, but we're going to have to rip out the guts and install a metric shit-ton of third-part / roll-your own / nonstandard packages, and then hope that the poor third-generation admin to inherit this cesspit can make heads or tails of it.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Since my favorite Debian combo was already mentioned, I should mention my usual plan-B: CentOS with CentOS Plus enabled on the server. What flavor of Unix you run on the desktop is irrelevant, although I frequently find myself in dependency hell when I am working on a Mac. Installing the qtconsole version of iPython is next to impossible.
deleted 15y ago
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shadowfox 15y ago

It has happened to me once in a while. In fact my full upgrade to (k)ubuntu 11.04 ended up leaving the machine in a unbootable state. Not a big deal since I had data backups. But still time consuming.

pointyhat 15y ago

+1 here. mysql-server is compltely broken in 10.04LTS.

deleted 15y ago

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