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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Debian testing is way more stable than Ubuntu stable. In Debian's parlance, Testing means "release candidate", actually.

If you want real testing, you should run "unstable". If you're in for fun, try experimental.

Running Testing on my desktops and stable on my servers since forever. None of them broke, none of them created problems.

I don't care Stable running 6.x.x. It gets security updates in less than 24h, and is applied automatically before I wake up, and doesn't ship coreutils with 104CVEs, just because it's Rust.

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Testing doesn't get timely security updates. It's not for serious people with production systems. It shouldn't even be a debate.

I believe I need to reiterate: Stable is for servers, testing is for desktops if you're not directly exposed to internet.

Again. Stable is for servers, testing is for personal use.

I never argued otherwise, ever.

Google disagrees - https://itsfoss.com/goobuntu-glinux-google/

Debian security team used to offer support for testing, but as the distro grew and attack surface increased, that was dropped. However, security incidents are patched in unstable as well and they float up to testing relatively quickly (for a desktop system, anyway). When things freeze, security updates directly land on testing as a fixup polish.

However, while Testing is "relatively secure", it's never "Server secure". I'd never use testing or testing packages in stable or any server for that matter.

The comment you're replying to makes clear that they're not using it on servers. I do the same thing (testing on my laptop(s), stable on my servers); you just have to commit to keeping track of what's going on and manually patch if you think that it's necessary.

I have to add that for me, testing definitely breaks stuff sometimes. Nothing beyond my ability to fix, though. Nothing beyond anyone's ability now that AI is around.

> I have to add that for me, testing definitely breaks stuff sometimes.

That's interesting, can you give an example? Asking as a curious Debian user.

Testing is the staging area for the new Stable release.

However, one thing that many people don't know is that Testing enters a package freeze every time a new Stable release is to come out. And this freeze can last anywhere between 4 to 7 months. So for that time period, it stops having frequent updates and becomes essentially a stable distro.

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