Testing is usually a bad distribution to use for anything in production. If something breaks, it will stay broken for quite a long time until the fix makes it out of Unstable.

Unstable is almost always a better choice. Things may occasionally break, but fixes will arrive very quickly.

I'm talking about regular desktop usage, not about servers. And things break in testing only if maintainers messed up transition. Related packages should come in consistently otherwise.

'Testing' is also usually the last branch to get security updates, sometimes weeks later.

I think that's something they tried to fix, with testing security repo.

Perhaps they are trying to improve the situation, but I read Debian security advisories regularly, and they are almost always published without a fix on the testing branch.

Unstable is the Debian branch to use if stable is too slow for one's tastes. The testing branch is just for testing and it's really not safe to use on the internet.

I am also talking about regular desktop usage, not servers.

Serious question...

Can't you make the same argument against using stable for the same reason?

> If something breaks, it will stay broken for quite a long time until the fix makes it out of unstable [and testing].

Stable usually doesn't get such issues. They are related to transitions. Sometimes it happens, that some packages are stuck in unstable for example, because they don't build on some arch, while their related packages go through. In result, testing gets an inconsistent combination, while unstable is OK. It happens when someone didn't take care to specify that these packages should only move to testing together.

This won't happen with stable, since it will get the consistent result in the end.

that's sysadm 101.

on stable you don't get data corruption bugs, and you shutdown or filter security holes until they are confirmed fixed.

on testing/unstable you can have data corruption bugs and everything else. but you may bet that security fixes are done faster. emphasis on bet.

Stable moves much slower (if at all), so breakages are much less likely, and packages are battle-tested. A cutting-edge or rolling distro, like Unstable, gets a lot more changes, and you get to do the battle-testing yourself.

Basically you install the Stable system to get a stable system, and then 'bring forward' just those packages you need.

I needed gcc 6 for testing and decided to upgrade the whole system about three weeks ago. It was very easy and it's still pretty stable. I might do a fresh reinstall now...

If you go from stable to testing (or unstable), it should work relatively well closer to release time when bugs in upgrade path are mostly ironed out.

I was talking about the freeze itself though. It affects testing too which is normally rolling. So if the freeze is too long, things start becoming annoying.