As others have said I wouldn’t recommend testing as it doesn’t get security updates, however I personally run sid (unstable) and have for a long time now. At least since 2020 if I recall, it does occasionally break, albeit anecdotally less than my friends arch system, can’t comment on if that’s the distro or just our individual setups. The main reason I run it is because I like debian, I’m very familiar with apt, with its initramfs tools, with all of the debianisms but I wanted something rolling. I tried arch but it just wasn’t as comfy for me personally. That being said it is a bit like hard mode, there is no arch wiki, if you don’t do heavy customization that might be ok, sometimes I’ve wanted to tweak my initramfs and while I know the debian generator better than arch, there’s far less easily accessible documentation on it. In general it’s been such a good experience that I basically stopped distro hopping, it’s been my home now for a long time but I know I’m in the minority with that so take it as you will.

I’ve been running Debian Testing for decades, but I’ve recently switched back to Stable on my homelab server and started using Arch on my laptop.

Testing is not as stable as you want. It does occasionally suffer from problems that have to be fixed manually, just like in Unstable. In reality my system was mostly running Testing, with some manually pulled packages from Unstable or even manually pinned on Stable. This was sometimes necessary to solve specific problems, particularly security fixes that weren’t available in Testing yet. I followed all the security mailing lists and acted upon them manually to stay somewhat safe, which is a decent chunk of extra work.

In recent years it has become less and less important what software versions your distro ships with, since you can easily run software from Flatpak, homebrew, or even directly compiled Go or Rust software. Tools exist to keep all of that up-to-date automatically. In practice that solves all my cases where I wanted to run a different version than Stable offered, so it’s more secure that way.

If you want to run a different version of something as foundational as Gnome you’ve basically picked the wrong distro. It would be such a PITA to change that manually, with tons of dependencies on other stuff. Switching to a rolling distro would be a far more logical step, which is why I run Arch on my laptop.

In short: don’t use Testing. It wasn’t meant for what you’re trying to accomplish and you’re going to have a bad time (security + more manual intervention needed than you want). Either accept older software and the peace of mind that brings (running Stable is REALLY easy, everything is sorted automatically) or go for something completely different, like a rolling distro.

Personally I’m pretty wary of the new wave of distros basing themselves on Debian Testing. I have a feeling that they don’t realise what they’re getting themselves in to, and that they can’t offer the same level of support as Debian does for their Stable branch.

My almost 20 years old experience is that it’s the worst of all Debian worlds, and none of them are good in any case.

You would be neither getting distro’s promised stability, nor would you be close enough to getting upstream’s fixes like sid/unstable.

I vaguely remember Gnome’s bug tracker filled with duplicate reports about crashes that are long fixed upstream, but also don’t trigger in either stable or sid Debian packages. They all came from Debian Testing. Gnome must have been very happy with Debian enabling the crash reporter in their packaging!

Do note that sid/unstable itself becomes as shit as Testing whenever the next Debian release is around the corner, as the project freezes the world in that period (or used to at least).

If you want the imagined stability you guessed you would get from Testing, you can use Ubuntu. At least with that you won’t get packages that are left crashing for everyone. Or honestly, if you’re on a desktop, just use Arch. The supposed meme about using Arch exists for a reason.

Please don’t use Debian Testing. It doesn’t receive security updates in a timely manner. I previously made a post about it:

PSA: You should know that Debian Testing does not receive security updates in a timely manner, and is not intended for production use.

Unlike Debian Unstable or Debian Stable, there is no fast track for vulnerability fixes needed into Debian testing. In my post above, I note that Debian stable and unstable received a fix for a very severe vulnerability. However, Debian testing was left to dry for almost a week, for a known critical vulnerability.

If you want more updated applications, you can use tools like flatpak, distrobox, appimage, or nix to layer newer applications onto a system of any Linux distro.

If you want newer base packages and underlying utilities, like a newer desktop environment, you can get stable distros that provide this, like Fedora, or Opensuse Leap.

Unfortunately it is still in Beta, but Opensuse Slowroll is OpenSuse’s solution, a rolling release that delays package updates to test and iron out bugs before pushing updated versions out. It’s somewhat of an in between a rolling release and a stable distro, and a very promising model.

You can also just directly use a rolling release distro. Debian Unstable isn’t as bad as it sounds. Unstable doesn’t mean unreliable or prone to breakages. Unstable just means that the bugs deal with will constantly be changing, instead of dealing with the same bugs all the time.

But please don’t use Debian Testing. It’s in the name, it’s only for testing purposes.

I’ve been having good luck with MX Linux. It’s based on Debian Stable, and mostly just has some extra nice tools ontop of Debian Stable and that’s it. The only problems I’ve been having have been minor, and I think more general KDE+Wayland with HDR and VRR bugs you’d probably hit on most distros.

Well if you want no fuss solid stable, then you should probably use Debian stable and not testing.

What more updated software do you find you need that’s missing from stable? Any software I use where I want the fancy new current features, I install via flatpak, external repo, pip, compile from source, or whatever. I can’t think of any time where I went “oh but I can’t get that on stable”.

You can start on stable and upgrade to testing later on if you really want to. But you can’t downgrade from testing to stable without reinstalling.

I’ve been running Debian as a daily driver for many many years now and I pretty much always use SID. Once a month I get a package held back and have to do some manual ‘apt-get install’. That’s it. No other issues.

I switched to forky (current testing) the other day for the updated nvidia drivers (did not solve my issue) and it turns out that GNOME defaults to wayland. Took some time to figure that out.

I can’t comment on Debian Testing.

I just run stable and pull cutting edge stuff from back-ports or flathub.

For some fancy stuff there’s usually a .deb file to download from the official site.

If I’m really desperate, there’s always piping a curl command to sudo, if I really really trust the provider.

I’m pretty new to Debian testing, but so far it’s felt similar to Ubuntu. Probably cos it’s still Gnome. I’ve come across one app that’s not supported (proton vpn). I’ve also had a couple of system crashes, but my computer was acting weird before Debian, so it might be the hardware.