Debian: Stable Vs Testing

[English Guy]

I am still on Debian oldstable and want to do a new Debian install.

What I would like to know is does anyone have any experience with Testing please? I love Debian and stable is rock solid for audio work but the rolling release nature of Testing is very appealing, but I am worried about impacting reliability. Any experience shared would be appreciated.

(No 'use my distro instead' replies please. I am an experienced user and Debian is what I will use).

[folderol]

My experience over {mmmfty}{mmmmf} years is that 'testing' can be flaky for the first month or so, then settles down to be pretty solid.
What I do when a new release is imminent, is (in a root terminal) switch from testing to the current named stable one in (/etc/apt/sources.list).

I wait for the new testing to have been around for a while, then switch back to it (the same way from root), and do apt-get update, followed by apt-get upgrade. This has worked without problems over several releases, and on three different computers.

[Lyberta]

I'm using testing on my main PC since 2014 and it's pretty good. There's maybe 1 breakage per year and is usually fixed in a matter of 2 weeks. So far, no critical packages were ever broken. I'm very satisfied.

[tramp]

I'm using debian/sid aka unstable on my main machine longer then 10 years now.
Truly there are some glitches here and there, but they are really spare and almost they get fixed within 24 hours after reported.
What I do is to check if any known issue exist here:
https://forum.siduction.org/index.php?P ... board=22.0

If non related exist, I dist-upgrade. That works for me almost ever. If I run into a problem, I post it there.
Over the time I've learned how to fix a problem if one occur, so the maintenance effort is really small for me.
And, truly it is not wise to upgrade the machine when you are in the middle of a production process.

[English Guy]

Thanks

[Luc]

I moved from oldstable to stable just a few months ago and I've been fine. There were some glitches, packages that were missing for other things that I use, but nothing serious.

Testing should be another story, and I believe falkTX sort of recommends against it.

[ssj71]

lol!

I was just asking myself this today! I didn't notice this thread. Great to hear everyone's opinions about it.

EDIT: after some reading I think what I'll do is use stable until I find some packages that are out of date and I need newer. Stretch was just released in June, so hopefully (with backports) its not going to have anything too old yet. When I find that things are getting too old, I'll "upgrade" to testing. Since thats a one way change I'll wait until I need it.