> Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release.
been running "unstable" since 2007 as my daily driver, work-horse, dev-machine, ... Not once faced a "problem" I couldn't recover from. Not once a restore from backup of the main OS due to something the upgrade or OS had caused, no booting from a rescue-image. For something that comes without warranty and has "unstable" in it's name, it's pretty solid.
Apples and oranges of course, but it holds up also well compared to Windows (which tbf, has gotten more stable since Win98), or even compared to MacOS that also crashes at times even after version MacOS 9.x (which was when MacOS became usable in the sense of "stability").
Never been a Sid user (occasionally for specific packages) but I do find articles like these amusing - for me the transition from testing to stable is usually where I say goodbye to a Debian release. So farewell Trixie! Onto forky I go.
I’ve had a few instances of X not starting, over the years. Nothing terrible, and that’s as much down to me using nvidia cards as anything.
Lots of Debian Developers run unstable, and stable gets the most QA, but I'd be careful about running testing until it gets closer to the next freeze. When I used to daily drive testing, there was a period when it was completely broken. Stable and unstable were fine, but testing was borked.
Isn’t it also unstable in that packages may be removed or updated which could break your workflows?
There’s a small number of packages unavailable in Deb 13 that exist in 12. I assume at some point all of them existed in pre-stable trixie.
(AFAIK that's the only thing "unstable" means: no guarantee any given package will stay there)
Or, more generally, "stable" is supposed to mean things don't change within the release apart from security and bug fixes. "Unstable" is apt to change, both in terms of package versions or features and in terms of the way the system is structured. It can temporarily have broken dependencies or breaking changes as well. Or at least that's how it was when I used to run unstable years and years ago.
I stopped running sid not because of any instability or unreliability in the included programs themselves but because unstable required more active administration: apart from temporarily broken dependencies or upgrade paths, it made sense to stay informed on potential breaking changes. Stable(r) releases or distros rarely require almost any active care nowadays apart from installing security updates.
Again, my experience with sid was years and years ago but I don't suppose its fundamental nature as the active development branch has changed.
Unstable means that updates could change things about your system that you rely on. This could be a package getting removed, but it could also be a package upgrade that necessitates a change to your workflow or code running on the system..
Yeah, the distro for "Truly adventurous users" has never broken in a decade of use by myself and is essentially as bleeding edge as Arch.
It's just old ideas that get repeated even once they stop being true.
Just to be devil's advocate here, and pedantically point out that Debian Sid is not a "distro", I don't think it's correct to say that Debian unstable is "actually stable", because it's "unstable" from the perspective of Debian, not from a subjective, individual experience.
Debian release cycles have a strong focus on stability, and for those situations where it matters, like running a production server, that is a pretty important feature. Just because your desktop never broke doesn't mean it's not "unstable", it's more of a disclaimer that if you put serious things on top of it and it breaks, that's much more on you because you chose to go against maintainer advice.
For me personally, with exception of the Enterprise Linux family (Alma, Rocky etc.), there's no Linux distribution I'd rather run on a workhorse, production, long term deployment server than Debian.
> been running "unstable" since 2007 as my daily driver, work-horse, dev-machine, ... Not once faced a "problem" I couldn't recover from.
To be fair, sid had various bugs leading to unbootable systems since then. While it's possible to recover in such situations without re-installation or data loss, I believe that makes the term "unstable" quite fitting.
Well with a lot of packages, including from 3rd party repos, and only seldomly doing upgrades, one can get pretty stuck in resolver hell.. of course, noone to blame for the frankendebian approach but myself xD