Stable if you want stability, meaning it doesn’t change often (minor updates only).
Testing if you want newer packages that have at least gone through some level of testing. They’ve been in unstable for at least 3-10 days with no major bug reports.
Unstable/sid if you want to assist the Debian project by reporting bugs (which is always appreciated!), or want the “breaks all the time” experience of other distros.
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
An arch user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have to read the news before every update and apply a manual intervention a few times a year, and there’s only been like one time in history that an update made people’s installs unbootable despite them taking those precautions”.
A Debian user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have a cron job running that periodically runs sudo apt update. I have no idea when it does this or what’s changing when it happens and nothing bad has ever happened to me”.
Like, the fact that unattended-upgrades comes pre-installed and enabled by default (for security updates) in Debian GNOME vs the fact that informant exists to force you to read the news in Arch before you update should tell you that the two distros exist in two different universes.
and you have a choice with Debian. You can run:
Debian unstable doesn’t break all the time, tho. There’s only been a handful of times in my 27 years of using it that something got truly borked.
(That’s not counting times when two packages have the same file and there’s a conflict. That’s trivial to resolve once you’ve seen it a few times. Even that is relatively rare.)
Yeah, it was just a response to the Arch memes since I’m sure Arch doesn’t break all the time either.
Arch doesn’t break all the time either, but it’s a meme and therefor 100% true.
An arch user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have to read the news before every update and apply a manual intervention a few times a year, and there’s only been like one time in history that an update made people’s installs unbootable despite them taking those precautions”.
A Debian user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have a cron job running that periodically runs sudo apt update. I have no idea when it does this or what’s changing when it happens and nothing bad has ever happened to me”.
Like, the fact that unattended-upgrades comes pre-installed and enabled by default (for security updates) in Debian GNOME vs the fact that informant exists to force you to read the news in Arch before you update should tell you that the two distros exist in two different universes.