Yep, been driving it for like 2 years on my study laptops. Only ever ran into a single issue that made the laptop unusable which was Tailscale DNS conflicting with the system's DNS (been a while so don't remember the exact details).

If you don't need the latest stuff, aren't doing anything needing the latest drivers and don't really mess around with the shipped packages, it's excellent for just working and being reliable.

Ahhhhh, ok.

Wild… I think I might try to get my OS that big one day just for kicks

Yeah no doubt no doubt. I thought it was maybe a typo or something and was supposed to be 4.3, like someone hit 0 on the numpad

It makes sense now

It's sometimes unstable. But sometimes it's mostly stable.

testing, stable, oldstable, etc are pointers to named branches (named after Toy Story characters BTW). Unstable is also a pointer but it always points to sid (the neighbour kid that breaks the toys).

Testing isn't a rolling release. Yesterday testing pointed to trixie. Today stable points to trixie (because testing was completed and trixie has been "released") and testing now points to forky which is a new branch that is basically a copy of unstable. They'll do testing on forky and fix things and eventually stable will be pointed at forky (which will be Debian 14) and they'll make a new testing branch called something else.

It's an odd thing to call things "released" on a project that's done openly. Debian 13 was just released today, but you can install what will be Debian 14 right now long before it's released by installing forky. You can also contribute to their testing by submitting bug reports. But if you do install forky (testing) today, don't be too disappointed if there's a bunch of things broken because it's the same as unstable right now. It will get more reliable as things are fixed and eventually be considered as stable. When Debian 14 is "released" you won't need to upgrade anything if you're on forky because you'll have already been on it for a year or more.

But yeah, unstable is unstable, it's just somewhere people can chuck packages on and experiment. Things will break there. Testing is testing, it's there if you want to help out with testing. And stable is stable, you get that if you want something reliable and you don't want to mess around with software occasionally breaking and having to track down what broke and submit bug reports.

I like it for desktop, but for me XFCE is all I need. I figure I want to mostly focus on the application I'm using not the Window Manager. I click the icon, application opens and I do stuff, and occassionally run apt update && apt upgrade and kinda forget the OS is even there.

With games I tend to have more issues with older games becoming broken after awhile than with new games not working because the OS is old. Only problems I've had with new games is because I had a computer that was >10 years old and eventually the hardware couldn't run new games anymore. But then I mostly play strategy games and base builder games, so maybe that's why I don't have a lot of issues there.

Debian is the best OS for people that don't want to think about the OS.

I've been running Debian stable on a ThinkPad as my everyday machine for over a decade. It just works. No issues.

I daily drive Debian and I switched to Trixie once the tooling freeze kicked in. Now the release is stable I'll be able to enable backports for the few bits and pieces I like to have the latest packages for. Generally I want a rock solid base and I can always use flatpak/snap for more recent apps.

You mean Tracey Martell? 🤭

Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver?

I do, though usually not early in the release cycle. Normally I use stable, then pull the occasional thing in from testing if I want it and it's not in stable, and switch to testing if there's a bunch of stuff I want.

Right now, I'm on stable because trixie just went stable.

There are some packages that aren't compatible, that are alternatives that do the same thing, so apt won't let you install them at the same time.

Yeah and I know one of my laptops only has a 250GB drive.

I thought it was a typo at first, but it was explained. I get it now

How do you mean low value? I definitely see value in being able to have every package available offline in certain settings.

Maybe you got a cabin with a sick (single player) gaming setup but no internet (I dunno I’m spitballin’) and you want to do some updates.

Pack up a drive with everything possible and make it happen!

Bonus points is you run a fork bomb in parallel and see how far you get. Throw an egg on your heat sink for fun.

I think they meant low value as in low number, said in a positive way (16gb being a lower number than expected rather than a comment on the quality of it) at least that's how I read it

I've been running sid (unstable) on my htpc for almost a year now without any problems (wanted Debian, because that's what I know, but also wanted HDR support, which came with plasma 6, wichich was only in sid). Just as stable as Bookworm so far (anecdotally).

I've actually been thinking of moving my main desktop from mint Debian edition over to sid as well.

Sid is even one step more unstable then testing, so testing should be no problem either