How to install Debian Testing... and why you might not want to

[mesamunefire@lemmy.world]

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[eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws]

Debian testing is just a small resistence step of future arch users still scared to distrohop

[bunitor@lemmy.eco.br]

finally someone saying you shouldn't daily drive debian testing

[blastboomstrice@mander.xyz]

It's kinda how I ended up with nixos

Wanted a stable and cool system, so went with debian stable.

But stable was outdated for my taste, so I went to testing.

But testing had missing packets, so I tried to update to unstable, though I did it badly and crashed my system.

After resinstalling testing, I tried to make a semi-failed script to autodownload/update apps outside the debian repo, but I found out that nixos essentially did this, but much better. And I accidentally deleted my /usr/bin/ dir with that script, so I eventually went with nixos unstable:)

[c10l@lemmy.world]

Bath water … baby ?

I mean, the logical step is to go to Debian sid, which, despite its alternative name unstable, is really not. I’ve been running a gaming rig on it for over a year with nothing more than vey vey minor hiccups, mostly because I’m impatient and run apt full-upgrade frequently.

[blastboomstrice@mander.xyz]

As I said, the truth is I rushed it, I had upgraded to testing from stable and then tried to upgrade to sid, but it was a reciepe for disaster, lol.

Either way, I saw the dependency chaos happening, I was kinda uncertain which package was safe to upgrade (I had installed a debian package to mention buggy apps, but it confused me even more) or if the if any dependencies would change and cause a mess.

I then found nixos with its declarative nature which I found much less confusing and harder to break, so I spent around 4months testing it and then made the transition (this was the first time I was seriously considering transitioning to linux and I took my time to do it thoughtfully)

[starlightdust@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

I don't daily drive either distro these days but I've always found Arch to be more stable than Debian testing. I also just really don't like apt. I think its pathetic to not have parallel downloads in 2025.

[Guest]

Packages in testing get updated at the times that they can and sometimes this messes with other packages. For example I had pithos installed this morning, in trixie. An upgrade removed a dependency so it had to go. In another day or 3 I will be able to install pithos again, no doubt. Running testing when release is within 9 months since sarge and this is the only issue I have seen. Since it resolves itself, I never saw it as a problem.