yard21
09-19-2001, 04:04 PM
OK, I know, it's still beta, but are some of you working with it?
What are your experiences? Is it worth trying?
I'm thinking about buying it (downloading with my 56K modem would cost too much) and just want to hear some opinions, since I don't want to buy the potato, it's too much out of date I think.
Thanks for any response!
Craig McPherson
09-19-2001, 04:59 PM
I've been running Debian unstable on multiple systems for a few years now. I've never had any major problems, but there have been a few annoyances here and there. On a home system, go for it! On a server -- be careful. There are risks involved with Testing/Unstble, but I've never found it feasible to stay with Stable for any length of time, so there's no other choice. After Woody, we're supposed to start getting shorter release cycles (yeah, Linus said the same thing about the Linux kernel, so I don't expect much), so it may start becoming reasonable and possible to leave a machine running Stable. I'd like to be able to do that, at least on Server machines.
I haven't really found Testing to be any better/worse than Unstable. On the one hand, the system ensured that no release-critical bugs work their way into Testing, but on the other hand, this often results in version-specific dependencies being broken, plus you get no security updates for two weeks, which can be bad.
Another decent option is Stable + Proposed Updates. That might be the best option on a system where you want to keep at least partly up-to-date but where you also need to make sure nothing weird and unexpected happens during upgrades.