Judging by the way Ubuntu handles things, Debian Sid should be more stable right?

[Paluttoh]

The way I understand it is, Ubuntu takes Debian Sid and updates some packages here and there, making it more up-to-date than Ubuntu. Wouldn't this make Ubuntu less stable than Sid? I do remember having less problems with Sid than I do with Ubuntu.

I should add that I'm not trying to troll Ubuntu, I love Ubuntu and use it as my main OS.

[mamamia88]

Other way around. Debian sid is the testing ground for debian. Stuff get's put there pretty much as soon as it's ready and it eventually trickles down to stable. Ubuntu takes the sid base and freezes it at a certain point of time and makes modifications to make it more stable in theory.

[MadmanRB]

Sid is far more unstable.
Ubuntu while shaky is actually far more stable overall

[Paluttoh]

Other way around. Debian sid is the testing ground for debian. Stuff get's put there pretty much as soon as it's ready and it eventually trickles down to stable. Ubuntu takes the sid base and freezes it at a certain point of time and makes modifications to make it more stable in theory.

Thanks for clearing that up. I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone would use Debian on the desktop now.

[mamamia88]

Well I use Debian personally because the stable branch is super duper stable. You can't judge Debian based on sid. Sid exists so that all the bugs can get worked out before the next stable release of Debian.

[Paluttoh]

Well I use Debian personally because the stable branch is super duper stable. You can't judge Debian based on sid. Sid exists so that all the bugs can get worked out before the next stable release of Debian.

Oops. I meant that post to be directed towards Sid and Testing. I used Stable and Sid for a while and liked them both. I can see why someone would use Stable, but Sid seems almost​ pointless.

[mamamia88]

Oops. I meant that post to be directed towards Sid and Testing. I used Stable and Sid for a while and liked them both. I can see why someone would use Stable, but Sid seems almost​ pointless.

Well yeah it's kinda pointless you really need your system to work but if it's a spare system or something it's nice to be using sid because you always get the latest and greatest and if you find a bug you can report or fix it which is very beneficial to debian development. I hear that sid isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be and you can actually avoid most game breaking bugs by using a program called apt-listbugs which lists bugs before you accept the updates. I'm personally on wheezy right now because I'm trying to put the whole cutting edge thing behind me. Running alpha software just for fun can be fun on a spare piece of hardware but get's old after awhile on your main pc.

[deadflowr]

Oops. I meant that post to be directed towards Sid and Testing. I used Stable and Sid for a while and liked them both. I can see why someone would use Stable, but Sid seems almost​ pointless.

Without sid, there would be no testing or stable.
All packages have to start somewhere, and someone has to try to run it somehow.
Sure running sid is a crapshoot, and breakage here and there is expected, but life on the bleeding edge of possibly awesome software comes with a price.

[iamkuriouspurpleoranj]

Sid is ok. Quite a fun chap. Till he goes off the rails. Then if you don't know how to fix things it's time to bawl or reinstall. Wheezy is fine right now because it's frozen and in the bug squashing phase. Some of those bugs are probably acceptable for daily use - just not acceptable for a stable Debian release.

[UltimateCat]

Yup...unstable indeed but thank goodness for the men in Debian Sid Testing or my stable distribution of Debian wouldn't be up and running.

http://www.debian.org/releases/sid/

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable

A friend of mine runs Debian Unstable and the worst thing he has to do is re-install it-