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Living with Sid


raymac46

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Since I got my used Thinkpad to run as a Linux testbed I have been chugging along with GNOME in Debian Sid. I started out with Stretch when it was still in Testing but decided to live a bit closer to the edge.

So far Debian's unstable branch has been pretty stable - except once in a while when I decide a dist-upgrade is in order. Yesterday such an upgrade proposed to remove 150 packages including such things as Abiword and Gnumeric. This looked like a good way to blow up my Debian install so I went for the safer apt upgrade instead. Today I checked and dist-upgrade was only proposing to remove 2 packages so I figured that was safe enough.

Debian does warn that there are times in the Sid repository when all the dependencies haven't caught up to some major package introductions and that you should never just bash ahead without checking what might go down. Good advice.

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Well yeah, Arch is far better than Debian if you want to run a rolling release system Maybe you could consider Siduction for the Debian flavor.

Debian Sid is not as well set up as Arch is to maintain stability while upgrading once or twice a week.

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Yesterday such an upgrade proposed to remove 150 packages

There was a Perl transition that probably caused this. Finished now so it's safe again.

I agree that siduction is a better bet than pure Debian Sid, although it's not greatly different. Either way, the Upgrade Warnings section at siduction forum should be essential reading.

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Either way, the Upgrade Warnings section at siduction forum should be essential reading.

 

I guess I should have paid attention to that, back when I had siduction installed here! That experiment didn't last long, though.

 

While I don't run Sid, I do keep GParted Live handy, on a flash drive:

 

Based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2017/Feb/18)

 

http://gparted.sourc...ws.php?item=209

 

B)

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Good article.

I have to admit though - there is something that doesn't seem right about using a distro that is designed to be rock stable in such a manner. It is a square peg round hole situation in my view at least.

I do prefer Arch Linux as a rolling release because it is built that way from the ground up. I found that Debian Testing can get frozen for a while and that it won't be updated for security, and that Debian Sid goes through massive upgrades almost daily. Both aren't good for my blood pressure.

I am running Sid now on a test machine where I don't care if it breaks, but I'd never use it on a production machine. Good old slow boring stable Linux Mint 18 is fine for my trailing edge desktop hardware - at least it is now that AMD got its FOSS driver situation fixed with kernel 4.4 and up.

At the end of the day I am probably not enough of a Linux enthusiast to maintain a rolling release distro.

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I've been running siduction and its predecessors Sidux and Aptosid for over 9 years now with about a one year excursion to MX. In that time I don't recall reinstalling due to upgrade issues. A couple of times something was not right but fixable without reinstalling. It's been very stable for an "unstable" distro.

I did have to reinstall it once due to doing something incredibly stupid from another distro that was multibooted with it (chown snafu). :whistling: :rolleyes:

 

PS; that linked article has some serious errors some grammatical and some technical:

- Only US repos for Debian are listed. If you live somewhere else you would use different repos or a redirector URL

- siduction repo for kdenext no longer exists (maintainer left a couple of years ago)

- He says "Stability of KDE is pathetic". I'm a bit tired of writers making statements like this which are subjective and untrue for most users. KDE has never crashed in my latest install. Dedoimedo is just as bad in this regard.

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I have to admit though - there is something that doesn't seem right about using a distro that is designed to be rock stable in such a manner. It is a square peg round hole situation in my view at least.

 

Yeah, trying to make Testing and/or Sid be "rolling-release" can be problematic, I guess because from the Debian perspective those are development branches for Debian Stable, and not really releases.

 

On the other hand:

 

I've been running siduction and its predecessors Sidux and Aptosid for over 9 years now with about a one year excursion to MX. In that time I don't recall reinstalling due to upgrade issues. A couple of times something was not right but fixable without reinstalling. It's been very stable for an "unstable" distro.

 

Wow! Impressive run, 9 years. That doesn't sound bad at all.

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One of the best reasons to choose Siduction over basic Debian Sid is that they get the desktop design right - especially for something like Plasma 5. I don't think I'd want to try Plasma in Debian Sid as a desktop choice. I do think that Siduction's developers pay more attention to getting the rolling release concept working.

Debian Sid hasn't failed me yet - but I am well aware that there be monsters out there.

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At the end of the day I am probably not enough of a Linux enthusiast to maintain a rolling release distro.

 

Nay nay yer probably a more experienced and dedicated Linux enthusiast than I am. If you check out the latest update warnings for Arch you should never have a problem, an the warnings that could cause major problems are few and far between. Take as an example the systemd change over. If you had not read the warnings you ended up in the poop. If you read the warnings and took the steps you were ok. Or like me if you read the warnings and waited a few days then all you had to do was a normal update as all the problems were solved and corrections made.

 

:breakfast:

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