Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Using Debian Stable as complementary to Testing (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello everyone! It's been about a month that I'm experimenting Debian on an external disk. For the most time, I've been using Testing. The issue is, that some packages are missing from Testing, while they exist on Stable (or on Unstable). The biggest problem with that is that some packages require dependencies that don't exist on the Testing repo and as such I can't install those apps.

So, I thought about adding the Stable repo, at a lower priority. If something doesn't exist on Testing, it will grab it from Stable.

How bad is that approach? I'm not doing the reverse (using stable and grabbing apps from testing), which might be way worse. Does anyone else do that? I couldn't find anything related online.

PS. I'm a bit tempted to switch to Unstable all together, but I don't know if I'll be careful enough to use it in the long run.

PPS. I might build a home nas at some point (with Debian Stable) and keep regular backups of my laptop so that I'll be kinda safe if I ever switch to Unstable.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Here's a good read regarding the different versions:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html

3.1.5. Could you tell me whether to install stable, testing or unstable?
No. This is a rather subjective issue. There is no perfect answer as it depends on your software needs, your willingness to deal with possible breakage, and your experience in system administration. Here are some tips:

Stable is rock solid. It does not break and has full security support. But it not might have support for the latest hardware.

Testing has more up-to-date software than Stable, and it breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it might take a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times. It also does not have permanent security support.

Unstable has the latest software and changes a lot. Consequently, it can break at any point. However, fixes get rectified in many occasions in a couple of days and it always has the latest releases of software packaged for Debian.

Personally I mostly run Debian Stable and on the one machine where I don't I run a completely different distro altogheter (Fedora). If I didn't run Fedora I would rather use Sid (unstable) than Testing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I see I see, thank you for you quick reply. This tempts me even more to use sid, hmm.

This is a different question from the original post, but do you happen to know what to do when listbugs warns me that a package has bugs? I suppose almost all packages have some bugs to some degree. Should I just avoid them on Sid? Or should I check how bad the bug is (if it belongs to a serious category) and decide whether to update it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I say the solution is one step earlier. Backups and snapshots.

Use BTRFS or ZFS filesystem on your install and use snapshots to be able to rollback if things go bad.
Here's an example on how to set up BTRFS with automatic snapshots:
https://github.com/david-cortes/snapper-in-debian-guide

For backups Borg is popular:
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg