Ron Johnson: > Jochen Schulz wrote: > > Jordi Carrillo: > > > > No, if you rely on your system to be available 100% (time and function > > wise). No, if you don't (know how to) use the BTS, dpkg, apt, package > > documentation. If you don't know how to upgrade (and cannot find out > > except by asking here), take that as a sign that unstable is not stable > > enough for you. > > > > Yes if you have fun living on the edge. Yes, if you have enough time on > > your hands to fix a breakage now and then. > > But isn't Windows like that? I *know* that Mandrake "stable" is > like that.
IMO Windows is completely different. My box at work is surprisingly
stable, but that's because I almost exclusively use it to get some work
done. I seldomly install software and never hardware. My experience from
more than five years ago (when I didn't use Debian yet, but mostly
Win9x, a little bit 2k and then XP)) was that you don't actually
"administer" much, but just use it until it is time to reinstall.
I have never used a different distribution but Debian (tried Gentoo,
Suse and Ubuntu on spare machines, though).
> IOW, how much do you know about managing a Debian system, since
> *something* (big, small, middle) will break every month.
I am not sure what your question is.
> > Yes, if you take regular
> > backups of your important data.
>
> Really? Nothing that bad has ever happened to me.
I didn't experience major breakage or data loss either. But the
probability of this happening is much higher than with stable. A few
weeks ago, some people's XFS filesystems got corrupted because of a
kernel bug. You most probably won't get hit by such bugs when using
stable and a Debian kernel from stable.
Another example of with quite annoying problems was the transition from
Xfree86 X.org. My keyboard layout had been changed from German to US and
X didn't start at all because it didn't find some fonts.
J.
--
I wish I could do more to put the sparkle back into my marriage.
[Agree] [Disagree]
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