How unstable is "Debian unstable" ???

[Tsuroerusu]

Hey guys, I'm in a little bit of crabby situation, I'm trying to find myself a perfect distro (SUSE is great but I'm having a few issues with s few things, and no it's not YaST nor RPM) for myself, I've been looking a little at Debian unstable since it now has Xorg, KDE 3.4.2 and OpenOffice 2.0 with the KDE intergration.

(I hate Kubuntu, I find it the most crabby Debian dsitro I've ever tried, and I've tried a lot of them)

But my question is, how unstable is "Debian unstable" actually? I know unstable doesn't refer to the relieability of the distro but to the fact that it changes very often. One thing I hate about Fedora is that TOO often, to my experience, you run into to some bastard-acting missing libary, and I'm not interested in doing an apt-get upgrade in the morning and end up with a broken system.

I was actually going to FreeBSD, but it has some issues with the IDE controller on my motherboard and right now I'm sitting here and throwing every single imaginable curse word at NVIDIA for not making nForce drivers for FreeBSD, and thereby making me unable to run the operating system that I want to run. You know, when you're in a such situation it makes you really think about why Richard Stallman are so strictly against proprietary software, I tell you when it comes to drives the guy has a good point.

I've been playing with FreeBSD on a few other machines and I love it, but it doesn't do me any good if I can't use my IDE hard drives, because I just don't have the money to buy additional SATA drives.

[Wally Balljacker]

Debian Sid will definitely break sometimes. It is a development release afterall, but for regular desktop use, I find it to be very solid. Just as solid as any "bleeding-edge" distro like Fedora, or Ubuntu. You just need to be smart about apt upgrades, because it's very easy to let breakage occur. I've been running Sid for about 3 months now, and it's only broken twice, and both times it was my own fault.

If you want something alittle less high maintenance, that's less bleeding edge, you could always try testing. I don't have any experience with testing personally, but I'm sure it's harder to break than unstable.

[Tsuroerusu]

Debian Sid will definitely break sometimes. It is a development release afterall, but for regular desktop use, I find it to be very solid. Just as solid as any "bleeding-edge" distro like Fedora, or Ubuntu. You just need to be smart about apt upgrades, because it's very easy to let breakage occur. I've been running Sid for about 3 months now, and it's only broken twice, and both times it was my own fault.

If you want something alittle less high maintenance, that's less bleeding edge, you could always try testing. I don't have any experience with testing personally, but I'm sure it's harder to break than unstable.

Mama mia, today is just not my day
Sometimes you'd wish there were this "perfect" distro

Anyway, things go from unstable to testing right? Any ideas on when OpenOffice 2.0 enters testing?

[CptnObvious999]

Im not sure how stable testing is because Ive never tried it but unstable can be very unstable at times especially when a new version of kde comes out and if and when they try to update all the programs to be compiled in gcc 3.4 (since they are incompatible with ones compiled in gcc3.3 and lower). If you don't install too many programs and stick with the default repositories you should be alright.

[Tsuroerusu]

It's situations like this that almost makes me wanna just stick with some random distro and throw X-Window off and just stick with Links, Lynx, Emacs, Vi, Nano and stuff

[Linc]

Hey guys, I'm in a little bit of crabby situation, I'm trying to find myself a perfect distro (SUSE is great but I'm having a few issues with s few things, and no it's not YaST nor RPM) for myself, I've been looking a little at Debian unstable since it now has Xorg, KDE 3.4.2 and OpenOffice 2.0 with the KDE intergration.

(I hate Kubuntu, I find it the most crabby Debian dsitro I've ever tried, and I've tried a lot of them)

But my question is, how unstable is "Debian unstable" actually? I know unstable doesn't refer to the relieability of the distro but to the fact that it changes very often. One thing I hate about Fedora is that TOO often, to my experience, you run into to some bastard-acting missing libary, and I'm not interested in doing an apt-get upgrade in the morning and end up with a broken system.

I was actually going to FreeBSD, but it has some issues with the IDE controller on my motherboard and right now I'm sitting here and throwing every single imaginable curse word at NVIDIA for not making nForce drivers for FreeBSD, and thereby making me unable to run the operating system that I want to run. You know, when you're in a such situation it makes you really think about why Richard Stallman are so strictly against proprietary software, I tell you when it comes to drives the guy has a good point.

I've been playing with FreeBSD on a few other machines and I love it, but it doesn't do me any good if I can't use my IDE hard drives, because I just don't have the money to buy additional SATA drives.

Two things to try. Slackware or NetBSD.

[Tsuroerusu]

Hey guys, I'm in a little bit of crabby situation, I'm trying to find myself a perfect distro (SUSE is great but I'm having a few issues with s few things, and no it's not YaST nor RPM) for myself, I've been looking a little at Debian unstable since it now has Xorg, KDE 3.4.2 and OpenOffice 2.0 with the KDE intergration.

(I hate Kubuntu, I find it the most crabby Debian dsitro I've ever tried, and I've tried a lot of them)

But my question is, how unstable is "Debian unstable" actually? I know unstable doesn't refer to the relieability of the distro but to the fact that it changes very often. One thing I hate about Fedora is that TOO often, to my experience, you run into to some bastard-acting missing libary, and I'm not interested in doing an apt-get upgrade in the morning and end up with a broken system.

I was actually going to FreeBSD, but it has some issues with the IDE controller on my motherboard and right now I'm sitting here and throwing every single imaginable curse word at NVIDIA for not making nForce drivers for FreeBSD, and thereby making me unable to run the operating system that I want to run. You know, when you're in a such situation it makes you really think about why Richard Stallman are so strictly against proprietary software, I tell you when it comes to drives the guy has a good point.

I've been playing with FreeBSD on a few other machines and I love it, but it doesn't do me any good if I can't use my IDE hard drives, because I just don't have the money to buy additional SATA drives.

Two things to try. Slackware or NetBSD.

Hehe, who would have ever guessed you would suggest that?

Anyway, I just tried Slackware, and I must say, it's just not the distro for me. I'm not totally excluding NetBSD as a posibility, but it's lack of 3D acceleration is what makes FreeBSD look better for my personal need, even though I do play on my GameCube most of the time I also like playing Quake 3, and I think Quake 4 is pretty cool, Unreal Tournament 2004 and good stuff like that.

Linc, question for you, how does the ports systems of NetBSD and FreeBSD compare to each other? For instance when you compile from source with OpenBSD it creates a binary package installs that instead of doing a "make install" directly.

[Judland]

Actually, the whole SID unstable situation is what made me go looking for alternatives to my Kanotix box.

So far, I've been liking ArchLinux very much. You don't even need to re-install the base system more than once. A simple pacman -Su updates everything and does so from source tarballs. From the comments of the users on the forums, it's STABLE bleeding cutting edge.

It's not for everyone.... but is described as a marriage between Slackware and Gentoo, without the long compile times.

[snarkout]

Judland, do you feel like writing a quick and dirty how-to install guide for arch? I've talked with many folks who swear by it, and I'd like to give it a spin at some point. Their wiki looks like t has a lot of good info, but it's kind of spaghetti-esque. I'm apparently too stupid to get sysfs to do it's thing.

The only negative I've ever heard from folks I know is that because of the ease of building arch packages, there are a lot of complete sh!t packages out there for it.

[Tsuroerusu]

Actually, the whole SID unstable situation is what made me go looking for alternatives to my Kanotix box.

So far, I've been liking ArchLinux very much. You don't even need to re-install the base system more than once. A simple pacman -Su updates everything and does so from source tarballs. From the comments of the users on the forums, it's STABLE bleeding cutting edge.

It's not for everyone.... but is described as a marriage between Slackware and Gentoo, without the long compile times.

Hehe, thanks for the info, now I know not to go with Debian unstable

Anyway, I think I'll be sticking with SUSE, so far it's been great, the number of dependency issues is very small and by using apt-get, Synaptic and Smart, RPM is actually fairly decent.

[Judland]

Snark, if you don't mind waiting the weekend, I could probably write a document that outlines at least what I did to install Arch on my PII.

In general terms, I cover some of my experiences of installing Arch on my blog.

Knowing hardly anything about manually configuring a Linux install, I read the Wiki install guide from start to finish. I didn't understand it all, but it sure helped. I also just did a base and X-window install from the FTP server, rather than the CD, and let Arch set up my hard drive partitions on its own (tried to stay as simple as possible).

My only problem was with the set-up of Grub. The default settings mapped /boot to something like: /dev/disc0/...something something. After a bit of searching on the forums, I found that I had to change that back to (what I was use to seeing) /dev/hda3.

After that everything worked. Although, I could go into a bit more detail (step by step) for you.

[Judland]

Hehe, thanks for the info, now I know not to go with Debian unstable

Anyway, I think I'll be sticking with SUSE, so far it's been great, the number of dependency issues is very small and by using apt-get, Synaptic and Smart, RPM is actually fairly decent.

What ever works best for you, right Tsuroerusu?

I really like Kanotix. For someone who doesn't want to have to fiddle with config files and such, it's great. It just has been going through some bumpy times, having to handle what ever's going on with SID. In over more than a year of using it, I'm kind of nervous right now to do any sort of upgrade, as I don't know what SID's going to do to my systeml

Lately, any problems that have come up where resolved by spending some time on the Kanotix forums. But, I'd like to not have to worry about such things altogether.

[snarkout]

I'm apparently too stupid to get sysfs to do it's thing.

And of course, by sysfs, I mean devfs :~X - oops...

Anyhow, sure that'd be great judland. I'm not looking for a novel, but maybe at least pointers like "here's where I had to deal with this" or "watch out for this bit." You get what I'm driving at.

[Tsuroerusu]

Hehe, thanks for the info, now I know not to go with Debian unstable

Anyway, I think I'll be sticking with SUSE, so far it's been great, the number of dependency issues is very small and by using apt-get, Synaptic and Smart, RPM is actually fairly decent.

What ever works best for you, right Tsuroerusu?

Indeed so, a lot of people blame SUSE for being bloated and slow, but I find that a total lie in SUSE 10. Boot up time is very decent when you consider that it's a heavily patched kernel with lots of additional hardware support, and this KDE is just rock solid, Konqueror almost never crashes, and is very responsive

By the way Judland, I live in Denmark and a part of it is actually, in english, called Jutland (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutland), that where you got your inspiration from?

[Linc]

Linc, question for you, how does the ports systems of NetBSD and FreeBSD compare to each other? For instance when you compile from source with OpenBSD it creates a binary package installs that instead of doing a "make install" directly.

Well, there are 2 ways to use the package system in NetBSD. You can use the binary packages that are alredy created or install the package system which will fetch the source(s), patch them and compile for your machine. It's a good system, popular and has been ported to many things like solaris and linux as well.