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Living with Sid


raymac46

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Just a brief note on how things have gone for me with Debian Sid over the past few months.

  • First of all a used Thinkpad is a great testbed for Sid - or any Linux distro for that matter. I avoided the Optimus graphics option and got a Thinkpad with plain vanilla Intel. It works great. The laptop even came with an early gen Samsung SSD so it's plenty fast and powerful. There are a number of Thinkpad specific power saver packages you can install to give great battery life. As with all Debian distros you have to install an Intel wifi package that is non-free but after that wifi works fine.
  • There is an element of livin' on the fault line but I've only encountered two glitches so far and they were fixed in a few hours.
  • Lotsa upgrades. Every time there are more than 100 packages and that's updating every few days.
  • I am surprised at how much I like Gnome Shell. The latest version is pretty smooth. Mind you I've installed a few Gnome Shell Extensions to customize my desktop. Right now I have what looks like a combination of Xfce and MATE.

To conclude I think Sid works fine for me as an experienced user. Maybe someone less experienced would like Debian Testing but it runs into update problems just before it switches over to Stable. That's only every couple of years though. Debian Testing also gets upgraded a lot.

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I'm a long-time fan of Sid, been using Sidux > Aptosid > siduction for about 10 years or so, rather than vanilla Debian Sid. It's been mainly a smooth ride but I make regular system backup images especially when there are a lot of upgrades incoming. I think I only ever used backup once though.

The main things to stay safe are to check the list of proposed upgrades before hitting Yes when doing dist-upgrade. If lots of packages are to be removed, ABORT immediately and try again in a few hours or days. Also siduction forum's Upgrade Warnings can be a saviour.

As for Testing, I've seen some posts that allege it's not safer than Sid and sometimes less so.

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Good info, raymac46 and sunrat -- thanks! I don't think I'd run Sid here unless I wanted to get involved with providing feedback to Debian devs, or to let other users know about my experiences with it. In some ways it really does sound a lot like my experiences running Arch. Especially the part about lots of updates.

 

I am surprised at how much I like Gnome Shell.

 

I, too, enjoy using GNOME Shell. I run it without any extensions, though (in Debian Stretch). But I'm glad for other DEs/WMs because I like to tinker and set up the desktop in ways that I can't do with GNOME. One thing I don't like about GNOME Shell is that I can't see the full names of some apps in the activities overview, when I click on "Show Applications" to bring up the applications overview. Longer app names are cut off. Not a major problem, though.

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