Debian Sid on a Desktop?
Lately, I’ve been playing around with Debian sid in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is now my virtual machine of choice) for reasons that are entirely beyond me. That said, it looks like it could be potentially useful as a desktop system. I only worry about what kind of breakage I might experience. It’d be nice to get some feedback on perhaps some best practices for maintaining a sid-based system. But I guess you might want some background first…
I’ve become increasingly bored with maintaining my Gentoo machines. This culminated with me reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop a few weeks ago, At this point, I don’t even notice except that I am no longer repeatedly compiling packages every day. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that package versions are sometimes a little outdated (which is to be expected, given Ubuntu’s six month update cycle). This led me to examine what versions of packages are in the sid repository of Debian. As it turns out, it’s quite updated, with new versions of packages appearing very quickly. It’s led me to believe it might be all right for a desktop system.
My desktop system is rapidly becoming obsolete, and it slowly feels slower and slower as time goes on. (It’s using an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ which was originally purchased in late 2002.) Keeping the copy of Gentoo I have running on it up to date is increasingly becoming a dull procedure, and given my penchant for micromanagement… In any case, I’m slowly coming around to consider installing Debian on it, though I don’t know if I want to risk breaking it. After all, it isn’t broken, and I intend on replacing it within the next year. Maybe I just play around too much…
I could always just install Linux from Scratch. That’d be great for a laugh.
(By the way, if any of you happen to be looking for shared web hosting, consider buying from me at www.calindora.com. Why, you ask? I got tired of seeing hosting companies (probably dishonestly?) offering 600GB or 34TB or whatever amounts of disk space they’re claiming to offer these days. I feel bad for anyone who actually intends to try to use all that space.)
Have you taken a look at Arch Linux? There’s quite a bit of initial setup, but you get a fast (i686) binary distro with a rolling release system and a lot of elegance.
It’s noticeably zippier than Ubuntu, but not to the point of as much work as Gentoo takes. I like it a lot.
I did use Arch Linux briefly… I don’t remember the exact reason I stopped using it.
I vaguely recall that it would probably benefit from a larger developer base. In particular, a number of applications I used weren’t available in the base repositories, which meant moving on to the AUP.
I may as well reinstall it in a virtual machine to see how it’s changed in the last year or two, though.