Debian Testing is unstable?

Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s

Jokes aside, I don't think I'd use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I'm gonna look to another distro. For context though, that's mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.

It's sometimes unstable. But sometimes it's mostly stable.

testing, stable, oldstable, etc are pointers to named branches (named after Toy Story characters BTW). Unstable is also a pointer but it always points to sid (the neighbour kid that breaks the toys).

Testing isn't a rolling release. Yesterday testing pointed to trixie. Today stable points to trixie (because testing was completed and trixie has been "released") and testing now points to forky which is a new branch that is basically a copy of unstable. They'll do testing on forky and fix things and eventually stable will be pointed at forky (which will be Debian 14) and they'll make a new testing branch called something else.

It's an odd thing to call things "released" on a project that's done openly. Debian 13 was just released today, but you can install what will be Debian 14 right now long before it's released by installing forky. You can also contribute to their testing by submitting bug reports. But if you do install forky (testing) today, don't be too disappointed if there's a bunch of things broken because it's the same as unstable right now. It will get more reliable as things are fixed and eventually be considered as stable. When Debian 14 is "released" you won't need to upgrade anything if you're on forky because you'll have already been on it for a year or more.

But yeah, unstable is unstable, it's just somewhere people can chuck packages on and experiment. Things will break there. Testing is testing, it's there if you want to help out with testing. And stable is stable, you get that if you want something reliable and you don't want to mess around with software occasionally breaking and having to track down what broke and submit bug reports.

I have been running testing for years on most (except production servers or as i like to call them: Computers with a job) of my machines including desktop and gaming pc.

It works fine, BUT there will be times when something is not as it should (one recent example was some wayland related glitches, but nothing really bad), or you buy new hardware and need the latest graphics drives that are not even in testing yet.

It's perfectly viable to use AND you get to help make debian better with the occational bug report/additional info.

Daily driver here. Stable for servers, testing for workstations.

Debian Testing isn't as stable as Stable, but has been far more reliable than anyone else's desktop releases. I'm also not a fan of Fedora and others' policy of ending support on the day of a new release.

If for some reason you decide to hold back on an upgrade of Testing, you've still got five years of patch support coming. And if I do want to live on the bleeding edge, there's always Sid (also called Unstable). That's where you'll run into the kind of instability you can expect from a rolling release.

My favorite will probably always be Gentoo, but I don't always have time for that hobby.

Yeah, since 2000 I've always had a laptop with -testing. I'm just a user, but a user who wholly enjoyed the early days of Gentoo, overnight compiles and all.

I still fly on Windows. MSFS and IL Stormvik used to be my favorites, x-plane works on Linux just fine now. For the past 5 years I've been all Elite: Dangerous. E:D works with some fiddling under Linux but the helper programs are probably a real PITA. No drivers for the eye tracker at all (not Linux devs fault)

Understand, I don't edit images and if the doc doesn't work in libre I fire up a virtual machine and do the little dance to get the form or whatever filled out and then back to the real world. VM only connects to the internet for updates, never comms.

All of my important stuff happens on Linux or now Calyx on my pixel. Fuck MS, fuck apple and fuuuuuuck Larry Ellison for what he did to Sun

Not me, i just use Stable Debian.
I only Put Debian Stable on Computers I will rarely use. I wouldn't use Debian on a Gaming pc, I would prefer a rolling release (Arch based) Or fix release every 6 months

I used to, and the going wisdom there is to point it to the name of the next release, then once it releases, wait for the first point release before repeating with the next release.

The reasoning here is that once there's a new release, there's a ton of churn on testing as people pull in packages from unstable, so that's the time of the most breakage. So wait a bit for things to stabilize after a major release.

I used to run Debian Testing and it borked my install - never had that problem on e.g. Arch. I feel like because it's not a rolling release as the default but explicitly for developers, it's less stable. But that might just have been bad luck.

Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver?

I do, though usually not early in the release cycle. Normally I use stable, then pull the occasional thing in from testing if I want it and it's not in stable, and switch to testing if there's a bunch of stuff I want.

Right now, I'm on stable because trixie just went stable.

I daily drive Debian and I switched to Trixie once the tooling freeze kicked in. Now the release is stable I'll be able to enable backports for the few bits and pieces I like to have the latest packages for. Generally I want a rock solid base and I can always use flatpak/snap for more recent apps.