[OT] Onanistic Ocelot?

[Peter Alcibiades]

I have never had any problem at a system level.  Certainly not with any
instability with the minor upgrades.  What I usually do is upgrade from
stable to Debian testing about a year or so from what I expect to be the
release date.  By then its been 'testing' for a year or more.  Then a year
or 18 months later my version turns into stable, and I stick with it for
another year or so.  So basically I am going 2-3 years between major
releases, like from Etch to Lenny.  In between I do updates every few
months.

Occasionally you will find a package will become problematic.  KDE4 caused
some of this, many of the KDE apps had to be rewritten quite radically and
that introduced bugs in one I use quite a bit.  It was easy enough just to
go back to the last version manually however.  I use gdebi for the few
occasions its necessary to install packages other than from the
repositories.  The kind of thing Richmond is talking about though, its never
happened.

Hardware upgrades are pretty simple too.  The last ones I did as was
recommended to Richmond, dd to mirror the hard drive, then install the new
hard drive in the new system and boot.  Mostly it works just fine.  I did
have one issue on one occasion doing this, think it was the display drivers. 
I have also found as suggested to Richmond that doing a clean install leaves
things pretty much OK, as long as you leave /home alone on its own
partition.

There is a price with Debian.  It is not as user friendly as some, the admin
center you get with Mandriva or Magleia or PCLinux is far more user
friendly.  It lags behind a bit, you will not be running the latest version
of everything.  I very rarely care about that.  But its very very solid, its
a couple of years or three between major releases which is nice.  Its tested
to death before it becomes classified as 'stable', and its tested as a whole
distribution.

Gnome has become a real problem as Richmond and others have found.  I think
they have gone mad and are now making things you need every day harder and
harder, or sometimes impossible, to do.  For instance, gdm3, you now have to
edit text files to do autologin, and how exactly you set up xdmcp in gdm3 I
have no idea.  Any cutting edge gnome based distro is going to drop you in
this.

I think the answer for most people is probably xfce.  For me personally its
fluxbox.

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