Why I should be running Debian unstable

Spent ~10 years on testing, been on unstable for probably 8 more years now. It's great.

There are some periodic times when dependencies aren't satisfiable, but usually <1 wk. Aside from not being able to upgrade a package once or twice a year, I haven't seen any downside.

It's great having the larger selection of packages available & I am glad to get latest greatest versions of things. I don't know why I spent time on "stable"... I thought I needed it, that life would be chaotic otherwise. And sometimes I'd have to go pin packages I needed at more reasonable versions in. But eventually i switched to testing then unstable, & it's been great.

I get why people might want to run unstable. My own preference is the exact opposite. One of the main things I appreciate about Debian is that it's conservative and doesn't run on the bleeding edge. The tradeoffs involved in that in terms of not always running the most recent versions of programs and not having easy access to the newest software are completely worth it to me.

Another of the things I appreciate about Debian is that they've worked out a system that can accommodate both people like the author and people like me.

> dasel: JSON/YML/XML/CSV parser, similar to jq, but different syntax, not sure I'd grow into it, but often need to parse YML like JSON and failing

I maintain dasel on Debian, and It's such a nice tool! I don't use most of it's advanced capabilities, but being able to convert from/to any of those formats with a single tool is very useful.

until the next kernel update causes your nvidia driver to fail to compile

perhaps a more reliable option is to manually install a known good version of the kernel and any essential drivers and run "testing" instead of "unstable"

debian is conservative and works well for many people, but the (albeit rare) bumpy bits are just as bad as anything else in the linux world

Debian unstable would be my dream distribution if it received the same effort for security updates that stable does.