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> Please, don't recommend Debian Testing to unsuspecting people. Was parent unsuspecting? They said they wanted 'more frequent updates even at the cost of a l
by Jedd 3y ago
> Please, don't recommend Debian Testing to unsuspecting people.
Was parent unsuspecting?
They said they wanted 'more frequent updates even at the cost of a little stability'.
They sound like they're very much in the suspecting camp.
The challenge with Debian Testing is some security exposures are longer than for either stable or unstable, hence the recommendation to keep unstable in your sources, ready to go, and maintain some awareness around CVEs / DSAs.
> Even Unstable is supposed to be more beginner friendly.
I can happily disabuse you of that notion.
Definitely, you should not recommend Debian Unstable to unsuspecting people.
I have occasionally run unstable on one of my machines over the years, but now pretty much avoid it.
When it breaks you either wait for a few days for it to be fixed, or you spend a lot of time trying to understand what's broken - usually with a machine that doesn't get you to a GUI.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> Was parent unsuspecting? I really don't know. You don't get Testing at the cost of "a little" instability. You get it at the cost of things eventually breaking in an update, and you having to sort it out on your own. It's a failure mode quite unique to it, and nobody mentioned anything about this. So yeah, I don't get any reason to believe either way. (Also, Unstable isn't supposed to have this one failure mode, but it's supposed to have partial failures way more often. That fits the mental model of "instability" for most people much better than Testing.) But then, the alternative people are talking about is Ubuntu. Ubuntu breaks much more often than Debian Testing... Up to the point where people don't upgrade it carelessly, so they experience a more stable system. So again, I don't know. IMO, it was worth at least putting a warning there.