Hi I would like to share some interesting experience about using debian as desktop system. I have been using debian as my desktop system for several years. Lately, becouse I gained access to internet, i upgraded my system to the latest testing distribution of debian (etch, with the Gnome 2.10 environment). Gnome worked quite unstable, destkop was hanging in different situations, for example trying to download some file in different web browsers (firefox, epiphany) . Totem didn't want even to launch, saying something about network connection error.. or just not to start without displaying reason. Than, experimentally, I upgraded the gnome desktop environment to experimental/unstable with the command: apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment and now, when gnome 2.12 is installed it works much more stable (only one hang till now, that I couldn't reproduce) and totem launches and works now.. So it seems than gnome from experimental/unstable now works better than from testing..
At the end I would like to share my thoughts, and some ideas about debian development. Maybe debian development model should be verified, at least for desktop use. A user like me expects from desktop system to have as up-to-date as possible desktop software (gnome, kde, xfce etc..), tools like dia, openoffice.org and others.. Maybe it would be good to take look at other distributions, for example ubuntu, learn something and adopt some good idea's from that, for example - stable core and very up-to-date other software (at your own risk..) or from gentoo - allow optimazation for specific hardware. Trying to bring all the debian distribution to stable state takes long time, and the time seems to be longer from year to year. This is perhaps becouse of that debian's growth. It gets bigger and bigger and perhaps more difficult to bring it to stable state. I think it would be good if a desktop user could choose debian system that have the following properties: -stable core system -latest desktop software (gnome, kde, xfce, openoffice.org... etc) -optimized for specific hardware (or ability to compile and optimize) Maybe it would be good idea not to maintain big separate distributions (unstable, testing, stable), but just individual versions of packages or package groups as stable, testing, unstable, for example. It also could be good to replace the "unstable" name with "latest" or something like this, since it could be more stable than testing distribution in some cases. Best regards Radoslaw Warowny