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On 12 Aug, 2011, at 10:25 am, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Neil Stone wrote:Sometimes bleeding edge == bleeding frustratingWell - indeed...And I've just had a look at Linux Mint - noticed it's got a Debian base as well as an Ubuntu base - and the Debian is based on Debian Testing... I'm somewhat surprised that they are doing this, and expecting people to actually use it (and surprised that people are using it for day to day businessy critical things - like running an accountancy package!)If you want stability and support for day to day (and business) stuff, then get Debian stable! And you can get a minimal CD (180MB) which installs the rest off the net.http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinstReally - what are you going to gain by going to some of the more bleeding edge distributions? (unless you're a total control geek like me and want a different kernel, but even I stuck to Debian stable for everything else!)Stable is stable, and sometimes it's good enough for a long, long time..
Well, yes, except that debian testing is almost as stable as some other "stable" releases. "Testing" here means integration testing, I think; in other words, each package has already gone through fairly rigorous testing before being allowed into "testing", and the only bugs expected are integration/interdependency-type things. Crucially, packages in "testing" are "known good" and 90%+ expected to be in the next stable release in the same form (unless they're updated again in the interim -- debian releases are infrequent). Packages in debian testing are fairly current -- much more so than the generally intolerably out-of-date stuff in debian stable, at least for my uses -- but the true bleeding-edge stuff is in debian unstable, which only guarantees that a package will compile, more or less.
I always use "testing" and I've *never* been bitten. YMMV -- Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq