Testing vs Stable

[jmm]

Love LMDE. Distro hopped for two years and realized four months ago that LMDE had all I was looking for.

Here's the question...

Love the idea of the "Rolling Release" but Testing is not really a true rolling release. Also,love the idea of Stable Debian as I my needs do not require "bleeding edge" packaging.

Should I be using Stable with Debian Backports or Testing? In your opinion, what are the trade offs and which provides the better operating system? Thanks.

[Beardedragon]

The real question is what happens when your system crashes. I run both a stable and a testing version of Debian, (See Signature) For everyday use when I cannot afford to worry about what is in the next update I run stable. I consider Testing as close to cutting edge I want to go, Sid is too breakable. To see what is going on I check in on Testing, run the updates and currently we are waiting for VLC and it's dependencies fixed. BTW. VLC works okay on stable Saline OS. but then I am talking about Xfce. You could run two different versions of Gnome LMDE, one testing and the other Stable side by side.

[TBABill]

I was just in your shoes the other day. My needs changed and now I need solid/stable. I installed Mepis 11, although it's beta 2, because it's built off of Debian Stable. It is flawless for me and the updates should be relatively simple for the near future since it's just security and bug fix updates. But you can get the same great system with LMDE if you install, then change repos to stable, and then do the updates so you don't pull in any Wheezy stuff. Later iso's will probably be based off Wheezy so you won't have that option unless you get an earlier iso, but for now yours should work as described.

Good luck. I do like the idea of having 2 distros on one machine, one dedicated to testing and one to stable. Sometimes if you bork the system it seems to happen right when you need it for something important. That way you can reboot into the other partition and get things done.