[ohazi]

Not a Debian developer here. I've been running both Debian testing and unstable on various machines for about a decade and it's been great.

In my experience, the "here be dragons" description of testing/unstable is way overstated... they're both very reliable. If you install apt-listbugs and `apt-mark hold` anything with bugs that sound scary, you'll be fine.

It seems like a lot of people try Debian stable (perhaps thinking of it as an upgrade path from Ubuntu), are surprised by the ancient software packages, and then look elsewhere. Debian might want to consider changing the recommendations they make for new users. Instead of stable / testing / unstable, they could be server / workstation / testing.

[ufo]

I think that having to check the issue tracker before installing packages is exactly the kind of thing that people are talking about when they say "here be dragons". By your argument, we would also be able to call Arch Linux a very reliable distro. It can be if you know what you are doing, but it isn't something I would want to recommend to the average user...

> Instead of stable / testing / unstable, they could be server / workstation / testing.

I would love to see something like that, but I think it would need significant changes to Testing to make it usable for the masses. Some years ago there was some work towards that direction with Constantly Usable Testing, which explains some of the challenges: https://old.lwn.net/Articles/406301/