Stable, Testing, Unstable

[astrophysicist]

Hello members. What is the difference between Stable, Testing, and Unstable in respects to Linux?

- Astrophysicist

[budman7]

Exactly as the words say.
Stable, tested, proved,. Things in here will work.
Testing, they are still testing.
Unstable, these are new. If you use them you will be on the bleeding edge. But they are definitely unstable, they could break.

[lakerdonald]

Hello members. What is the difference between Stable, Testing, and Unstable in respects to Linux?

- Astrophysicist

Although it takes like 50 million years for debian to declare anything stable.

[jlgreer1]

Debian Sarge was listed as "testing" until a little over a month ago when it was declared stable. Most users do very well with the testing distribution.

At this point, I would go with Sarge since it is fairly current. If it begins to lack features that you need, begin to use packages from the testing version.

I would stay away from the unstable version unless you are a developer.

Jeff

[bryansmith]

Stable - great for servers, tested throughly
Testing - programs that are tested for later inclusion into stable
Unstable - latest and greatest but just as it says, it is unstable

Bryan

[Slackitude]

I'm using debian stable right now because at this time it's pretty current but in the past I've used testing and unstable without too much trouble. Given how many distros try to have the latest bleeding edge software debian unstable isn't a lot different to some distros regular release. That being said for anyone new to Debian I'd definitely suggest stable right now, it's got some good bells and whistles and that "hey this just works right" debian solidness to it.

[lakerdonald]

About six months ago, before they made the testing one stable, I tried Debian Stable, and it was a 2.2 kernel. Debian takes a long time between releases, so you might end up with really out of date software.