[clue-tech] My perfect Linux ... if it exists

[David L. Anselmi]

Keith Hellman wrote:
> I've had success running debian testing.  I've experienced pretty
> minimal breakage of packages, but perhaps I'm lucky.

This has been my experience too, but:

I know how to tell when transitions are happening and allow some packages to be held back because 
their dependencies aren't in testing yet.  To me that seems obvious but sometimes you select a 
package and aptitude tells you things are broke and then you have to be astute enough not to pick 
the resolution that includes removing a large number of things.

The only breakages I've seen involve kernel changes (I don't read change logs and such to the DDs 
have no easy way to warn me about changes that I'll notice).

For example, they moved some driver firmware out of the kernel and into a driver package.  There's 
no dependency so when things break you have to find the firmware package.

And more recently, the kernel started doing video modesetting and the default X driver changed to a 
package that doesn't support kernel modesetting.  So you get no X on reboot.  The error message (if 
you've seen the X logs) is easy to see and the boot setting to disable modesetting is easy to find 
on Google.  But some people might be disturbed by a non-X login and an extra reboot.

Note that this only applies to testing and unstable (and less so to testing).  I don't run stable 
but I assume most of these things are sorted out in new releases.

Dave