[TriLUG] Debian Sid/Unstable

[Ken MacKenzie]

Thought I would give some follow up.

So first of all let me say this, I love Arch Linux, it has truly been one
of my favorite distros.  But to coin a bad breakup phrase, it's not you
arch linux, it's me!  And that time I actually mean that, mark it a first!

Anyway so to clear up, basically my whole environment is Arch on
workstations, CentOS on servers.  CentOS I recently came back to from
FreeBSD (nothing wrong with FBSD either) but I was doing some
experimentation with Node and Mongo and going 64 bit on the server side and
CentOS was an easier transition at that exact point.  Also moving away from
Apache in favor of nignx.

So what I do, not counting my day job, I host and develop some web stuff
here and there.  Have a "droplet" at digital ocean I use as my production
server and in house a desktop is my development mirror.  The dev mirror is
also a file/ftp/smb server in house.  It is also a DLNA server and print
server.  Basically if there is a need for a server it all falls on that
machine at home.  Everything else workstation wise I do some coding on but
I do a lot of music related tasks.  Recording and production and learning.
I am a part time musician, professionally, yes I get paid.

So my desire to look into a return to Debian (which was technically my
first distro ever about 13-14 years ago) was to see if I could have more
parrallel in house server and workstation environments.  I also have an
Ubuntu machine the kids use.  I really dislike Ubuntu.  Anyway....

So thinking Wheezy for the servers and Sid for workstations would get me
close to what I do now.  Well looking at SID the I don't gain much as far
as the versions of software to make it an advantage over testing or even
stable.  LMMS for example is one where no matter the repo I will prefer to
compile the current version from source.  Same for Ardour3.  Lastly Cadence
can come from the KXstudio repos and jackd2 is in stable.

So oh yeah MY problem with Arch.  I have been a slacker.  Went Packer
instead of going to the AUR manually.  Get lazy and run a pacman -Syu
without checking posts about current issues first.  Never killed a machine
but also have had many hours of just dealing with stuff that fore though or
not prevented me doing what I logged on the computer for.

Technically I would have this same issue with sid.

So anyway I have installed a Wheezy VM on the dev mirror through
VirtualBox.  Pleased so far.  I have also installed a VM on my laptop.  Did
a dist-upgrade to testing last night and will move that to sid tonight to
see what is what.  But I am actually thinking I might go wheezy all around
and use backports or compile from source or option packages from testing as
needed for anything I need more up to date.  I don't care about bling, at
this point.  I care about polish and reliability lately.  So really my
priorities have changed.  And the only software the latest and greatest
absolutely matters is the music software and at that just certain specific
items.  And controlling them manually will force me to check the release
notes more so I don't affect my workflow.

Who knows in 6 months I might be back to Arch.  I love the rolling
release.  But there are times where it's philosophy has impeded what I
needed to do through purely my own fault.

Who knows I might just go full retard and wipe the laptop and go Wheezy on
that without any more research into this.  It is my least mission critical
machine at present.  If that succeeds then I will slowly migrate the other
workstations and eventually the servers.

I do really appreciate all the info guys, and again Arch Linux, it's not
you, it's me, hehehehehe, no really...

Ken

P.S.  Bounced so had to trim reply chain, hope this doesn't show twice for
all, sorry if it did, again it's me not you. hehehehehe