Some thoughts about distro's releases and Debian

Today I was reading planet KDE and found a blog post from Jason 'vanRijn on how he went trough different distros, starting in OpenSuse and finishing in OpenSuse [0]. The difference: he started in 10.3 and finished in 11.

At this point I asked myself since when I do not care abou the current Debian release I am using. If it weren't for disk space problems, or disk failures (or partinioning the wrong partition when trying to test another distro :-( ), I would have not installed any other Debian release but the one that I had at hand during the first installation. And I keep myself really up to date. Yes, you guessed it: apt's magic combined with Debian's workflow =) .

Once a Debian system is installed (I tend to install the current testing), releases almost lose meaning for me. If the computer will be used by newbies, I configure testing and unstable repos in sources.list, and I set apt's default-release in testing. Works like a charm. They can have any package that is in Debian repos, with a very great sense of robustness. In my particular case, I have the same sources.list, and set the default release to unstable. The rest of the magic is done by apt.

Of course, I am not saying that Debian should leave the release cycle. We need it. There are lots of things that get improved thanks to this.

I guess Debian has something I see as to different workflows for someone who installed it. If you need the rock solid Debian, get the stable and keep it until next stable release. But if you run a desktop, change your mind, apt is your best friend.

[0] OpenSuse guys: I have been hearing a lot of good stuff from you lately, kudos for you all :-D

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