Great and Powerful OS.

loved this

Does this mean it will run properly on systems with multiple, different resolution, displays?

Daily friver here. Stable for servers, testing for workstations.

Debian Testing isn’t as stable as Stable, but has been far more reliable than anyone else’s desktop releases. I’m also not a fan of Fedora and others’ policy of ending support on the day of a new release.

If for some reason you decide to hold back on an upgrade of Testing, you’ve still got five years of patch support coming. And if I do want to live on the bleeding edge, there’s always Sid (also called Unstable). That’s where you’ll run into the kind of instability you can expect from a rolling release.

My favorite will probably always be Gentoo, but I don’t always have time for that hobby.

Debian Testing is unstable?

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.

I have been running testing for years on most (except production servers or as i like to call them: Computers with a job) of my machines including desktop and gaming pc.

It works fine, BUT there will be times when something is not as it should (one recent example was some wayland related glitches, but nothing really bad), or you buy new hardware and need the latest graphics drives that are not even in testing yet.

It’s perfectly viable to use AND you get to help make debian better with the occational bug report/additional info.

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.

I used to run Debian Testing and it borked my install - never had that problem on e.g. Arch. I feel like because it’s not a rolling release as the default but explicitly for developers, it’s less stable. But that might just have been bad luck.

Not me, i just use Stable Debian.
I only Put Debian Stable on Computers I will rarely use. I wouldn’t use Debian on a Gaming pc, I would prefer a rolling release (Arch based) Or fix release every 6 months

Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver?

I do, though usually not early in the release cycle. Normally I use stable, then pull the occasional thing in from testing if I want it and it’s not in stable, and switch to testing if there’s a bunch of stuff I want.

Right now, I’m on stable because trixie just went stable.

Yeah, since 2000 I’ve always had a laptop with -testing. I’m just a user, but a user who wholly enjoyed the early days of Gentoo, overnight compiles and all.

I still fly on Windows. MSFS and IL Stormvik used to be my favorites, x-plane works on Linux just fine now. For the past 5 years I’ve been all Elite: Dangerous. E:D works with some fiddling under Linux but the helper programs are probably a real PITA. No drivers for the eye tracker at all (not Linux devs fault)

Understand, I don’t edit images and if the doc doesn’t work in libre I fire up a virtual machine and do the little dance to get the form or whatever filled out and then back to the real world. VM only connects to the internet for updates, never comms.

All of my important stuff happens on Linux or now Calyx on my pixel. Fuck MS, fuck apple and fuuuuuuck Larry Ellison for what he did to Sun

I daily drive Debian and I switched to Trixie once the tooling freeze kicked in. Now the release is stable I’ll be able to enable backports for the few bits and pieces I like to have the latest packages for. Generally I want a rock solid base and I can always use flatpak/snap for more recent apps.

I’ve been running sid (unstable) on my htpc for almost a year now without any problems (wanted Debian, because that’s what I know, but also wanted HDR support, which came with plasma 6, wichich was only in sid). Just as stable as Bookworm so far (anecdotally).

I’ve actually been thinking of moving my main desktop from mint Debian edition over to sid as well.

Sid is even one step more unstable then testing, so testing should be no problem either

I used to, and the going wisdom there is to point it to the name of the next release, then once it releases, wait for the first point release before repeating with the next release.

The reasoning here is that once there’s a new release, there’s a ton of churn on testing as people pull in packages from unstable, so that’s the time of the most breakage. So wait a bit for things to stabilize after a major release.

You could have a look at MX Linux.

Get base Debian, you’ll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it’s specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I’m trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I’d recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

If you’re a noob, what made you go with Debian in the first place?

I want to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that, just not the usual path for a new Linux user.

10 GB storage for default installation, 4 GB storage for commandline-only installation, 403 GB storage if you install every Debian package under the sun.

That’s how much space the whole of Debian takes up. Every package for every supported architecture. Not sure if it includes the space taken by the installation ISOs too.

A bare minimum installation of Debian (meaning just command-line with a minimal number of programs) is probably around 1GB or so? They recommend at least 4GB space for a server install and 10GB for a desktop.

I just looked, 11G on my laptop’s /

Standard productivity stuff, I think the only extra thing is a flatpack of google earth which is 1.5G

That threw me for a second too. I thought “that’s a bit of a leap”. Like others said, it’s everything, not just the recommended packages.

Oh! That’s if you installed every piece of software they support! A regular installation is quite modestly sized, and install media is DVD sized.

I can see where that would be confusing though hehe

Trixie from Toy Story. Debian’s releases are always toy story characters

You mean Tracey Martell? 🤭

It works well, so long as you don’t mind your DE being a bit behind the latest version. With how much Plasma and Gnome have been improving in the past couple of years, that may matter a lot.

To be honest, I think it makes more sense than it used to. You can have an extremely stable base, and if you want regularly updated user apps you can utilise Flatpaks.

It works great with Plasma desktop

I’ve been running unstable for a couple decades now as my desktop. I’ve occasionally taken months-long forays into other distros, but always come back to Debian. It just works, which is what I care about.

I’ve been running Debian stable on a ThinkPad as my everyday machine for over a decade. It just works. No issues.

It’s great. Not much else to say. You install it, it works, it doesn’t stop working unless you break it. I run Debian 12 on my laptop.

I have many times. apt install whatever desktop environment you want is usually a one-liner, and they are the un-modified stock versions, not themed to whatever fancies the distro maintainer. It has been my low-effort distro for a lot of years for any purpose. Packages are on the stale-side, so you might want to use different package container types for your preferred applications nowadays.

Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?