After spending a bit getting comfortable with Debian 11 stable, I decided to upgrade stable to testing. The directions for doing this are provided by Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting . It works, and when it’s upgraded to testing, the versions of all the tools pretty much match what you’ll find in Fedora 36. I found the directions simple and easy to follow. I should note that I changed the entries for bullseye to bookworm, rather than testing. Using “testing” means the installation stays on testing forever.
The only odd quirk in the upgrade is with the desktop environment. Debian 11 uses Gnome 3, while Debian testing claims it uses Gnome 42 if you look in Settings | About. That’s not actually a problem for me, as I prefer Gnome 3 over Gnome 4x. This is a “problem” I don’t think I’ll try to “fix.”
Radarwitch
I did this for a while, too…
Many people say that Debian is “too old” for a desktop, and in some regards they are right – having the latest and greatest Firefox or Thunderbird does not only have its merits, it can be a security aspect.
And what most people also don’t realize is that if you’re staying on ‘testing’, you’ll have something like a rolling release Manjaro or EndeavourOS, except with the ‘apt’ and ‘dpkg’ system (which I’d prefer to be honest). Also, if you stay on ‘Sid’, you’d probably have something like Arch…
After a while I decided that I can live with Debian stable, and the Debian security guys do a good job on updating that. For music-related stuff I also add the KXStudio repositories to have things like Cadence or Carla (nicer than QJackCTL IMO), but since a few weeks/months I turn to Arch more and more, with pipewire/wireplumber and all. And they even got OBS Studio working with Wayland, that’s still a pain on Debian where I’d have to switch to X.Org and using simplescreenrecorder instead, or OBS with X.Org.
So I’ll stay with Debian stable for most stuff, watching Arch for the new and exciting things. And I’ll be looking forward to getting a new Debian release each few years, that’s a bit like Christmas as well then… ;)
Interesting to read your views on all of that, thanks for sharing Bill :)
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[…] friend from Florida who is also a programmer recently decided to try Debian, and, some days later, decided to upgrade it from ‘stable’ to ‘testing’. I commented on his blog that I had done so as well for a while, but in the end I decided that […]
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