It’s sometimes unstable. But sometimes it’s mostly stable.
testing, stable, oldstable, etc are pointers to named branches (named after Toy Story characters BTW). Unstable is also a pointer but it always points to sid (the neighbour kid that breaks the toys).
Testing isn’t a rolling release. Yesterday testing pointed to trixie. Today stable points to trixie (because testing was completed and trixie has been “released”) and testing now points to forky which is a new branch that is basically a copy of unstable. They’ll do testing on forky and fix things and eventually stable will be pointed at forky (which will be Debian 14) and they’ll make a new testing branch called something else.
It’s an odd thing to call things “released” on a project that’s done openly. Debian 13 was just released today, but you can install what will be Debian 14 right now long before it’s released by installing forky. You can also contribute to their testing by submitting bug reports. But if you do install forky (testing) today, don’t be too disappointed if there’s a bunch of things broken because it’s the same as unstable right now. It will get more reliable as things are fixed and eventually be considered as stable. When Debian 14 is “released” you won’t need to upgrade anything if you’re on forky because you’ll have already been on it for a year or more.
But yeah, unstable is unstable, it’s just somewhere people can chuck packages on and experiment. Things will break there. Testing is testing, it’s there if you want to help out with testing. And stable is stable, you get that if you want something reliable and you don’t want to mess around with software occasionally breaking and having to track down what broke and submit bug reports.
CountVon@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s
Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah, if you really want a taste of Debian desktop, LMDE is probably where I’d start.
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yep, been driving it for like 2 years on my study laptops. Only ever ran into a single issue that made the laptop unusable which was Tailscale DNS conflicting with the system’s DNS (been a while so don’t remember the exact details).
If you don’t need the latest stuff, aren’t doing anything needing the latest drivers and don’t really mess around with the shipped packages, it’s excellent for just working and being reliable.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I like it for desktop, but for me XFCE is all I need. I figure I want to mostly focus on the application I’m using not the Window Manager. I click the icon, application opens and I do stuff, and occassionally run apt update && apt upgrade and kinda forget the OS is even there.
With games I tend to have more issues with older games becoming broken after awhile than with new games not working because the OS is old. Only problems I’ve had with new games is because I had a computer that was >10 years old and eventually the hardware couldn’t run new games anymore. But then I mostly play strategy games and base builder games, so maybe that’s why I don’t have a lot of issues there.
Debian is the best OS for people that don’t want to think about the OS.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
So what distro do you use? I definitely am also considering gaming in the considerations.
CountVon@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Juat wanted to chip in and say that PikaOS is a gaming specific OS based on Debian Testing. Been running it the last couple of months and been enjoying the heck out of it! wiki.pika-os.com/en/home