Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?

Great and Powerful OS.

loved this

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

10 GB storage for default installation, 4 GB storage for commandline-only installation, 403 GB storage if you install every Debian package under the sun.

That's how much space the whole of Debian takes up. Every package for every supported architecture. Not sure if it includes the space taken by the installation ISOs too.

A bare minimum installation of Debian (meaning just command-line with a minimal number of programs) is probably around 1GB or so? They recommend at least 4GB space for a server install and 10GB for a desktop.

I just looked, 11G on my laptop's /

Standard productivity stuff, I think the only extra thing is a flatpack of google earth which is 1.5G

That threw me for a second too. I thought “that’s a bit of a leap”. Like others said, it’s everything, not just the recommended packages.

Oh! That's if you installed every piece of software they support! A regular installation is quite modestly sized, and install media is DVD sized.

I can see where that would be confusing though hehe

Get base Debian, you'll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it's specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I'm trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I'd recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

Trixie from Toy Story. Debian's releases are always toy story characters

You mean Tracey Martell? 🤭