Debian "unstable" vs. Debian testing

[Droo]

In my brief but life-changing experience with Debian, I've been using woody (testing). Now as I get ready to put together a new home machine, I'm wondering if I should go with Sid (unstable).

I originally liked the premise behind testing--the idea that packages in testing had been well-tested in unstable--but now I find myself reconsidering.

I can list several examples (most notably for me right now task-x-window-system) that are in potato (stable) and sid, but not in woody. I can understand the logic behind this (older package in potato, new package in sid, wait before well tested before package appears in woody), but lately I've been more tempted by the latest and greatest sid has to offer.

So what do you Debian gurus think? Am I OK going with sid since this is just a home desktop we're talking about?

[crazyox2]

Go for it! I use unstable. I love it.

[Inctoan]

I also use unstable and I really like it. But a word of advise if you use KDE, do not get it from Debian's unstable tree, KDE 2.2 beta 1 , get it here http://kde.debian.net/
KDE 2.1.2. Trust me KDE 2.2 beta is very buggy.

[Strike]

unstable is generally pretty solid in spite of its name. But things will break. In fact major things will break. Case in point - the recent 0.72-26 libpam packages wouldn't allow logins of any kind using either su or login. If you didn't stay in root, you had to reboot and go into single-user mode to fix the packages by either downgrading or grabbing the new ones off of incoming.debian.org. To me, that kind of things is fine, and worth it for the bleeding edge of stuff. But I hang out in #debian on irc.openprojects.net where I can ask about these things, and I'm good enough with apt to know how to fix these things without dragging my system down.

So, chances are nothing majorly bad will happen with sid for a while (especially now that we're trying to get Woody frozen). But, things will mess up and bad packages will appear, and there may not be a fix right away (though there usually is one quickly).

If you are ready to deal with all of that, go with unstable. Otherwise stay with testing - it's not that far behind.