On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 08:12:07 -0500 John Hasler <j...@sugarbit.com> wrote:
> Andrei writes: > > Unstable is challenging when you rely on that system for any kind of > > useful work, regardless if a movie night with friends or a big > > presentation at work, as each and every upgrade has the potential to > > break your system in new and interesting ways. > > I've run Unstable on my desktop for decades. It's been at least 15 > years since an upgrade gave me any serious trouble. However, I don't > use a desktop environment (unless you call FVWM a DE) and I only > upgrade when it is both safe and necessary. > > I did recently have a problem with an Exim4 upgrade but I believe it > was primarily due to my customizations (I switched to Postfix as > that's the simplest way to do "wipe it all out and start over"). I've had a logjam for most of a year on a few items which can't be upgraded because of an odd dependency issue involving guile-2.0 and 2.2. Yesterday, I had a need for inkscape, which I rarely use and which could only be installed by removing half a dozen programs I use much more often. So I put it on my stable netbook instead. When I'm sufficiently annoyed with the problem I'll do a reinstall but there are over 4000 packages and if I do an automatic reinstall it will probably just recreate the same problem. I think unstable is fine if you have an alternative computer, (basically, owning a computer is fine if you have an alternative computer) but by itself can occasionally mess things up. -- Joe
