Comment by joe200
9 hours ago
You are comparing Fedora with Debian stable. Everyone who wants to have Debian stability (and ecosystem) with the most new upstream software should go for Debian Testing (and don't be fooled by the name "testing" !). Debian Stable is for servers, Debian Testing is for desktops. Just try Debian Testing (and I used Slack, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian)
This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers.
What changed?
Most of the problems that break a system are being resolved in unstable rather than testing.
I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.
This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable]
The testing happens in Debian Sid.
But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.
Debian testing is pretty much the worst option to choose. It can be as "unstable" as unstable, while being nearly as out-dated as a stable at points.
If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.
The "testing" name is one of the worst decision of Debian community IMHO. It misleads people.
I very much agree with this, it also scared me off Debian Testing initially as well.
I wonder how many potential users have been scared off by the name... Maybe Debian devs like it that way, less annoying desktop users to support.
It looks like you have never used Debian testing (or used it 10 years ago ?). The testing phase is in Debian Sid and _not_ in Debian testing.