[rollerrrr]

Agreed, but that's actually an (UX) problem that Debian should fix. "Testing" is an awful name for "stable enough for normal use". When I first installed Debian I made the same error of installing stable on desktop and then fighting with it to install packages from testing... Just renaming testing to "regular" would prevent lots of wasted time all around.

[bbanyc]

It's been this way forever, though - when I started woody was "stable" but obsolete the day it was released. Since "stable" and "testing" are aliases of branch names, changing them would break scripts all over the place. You move to Debian, you have to learn to speak the language.

Though the truly baffling bit of Debianese is "contrib" which means "this is free software but depends on non-free software." I can kinda see how it came to mean that, but it's very non-intuitive.

[marcosdumay]

Testing is only ok for desktops if you are ok with reinstalling it every so often, like with other distros. It won't last longer than your hardware, and will get odd problems after an upgrade once in a while.

Stable basically means it won't change, and says nothing about freshness. Debian has recently adopted a policy of releasing on a time basis, so it's never very stale.

[pm7]

I used testing for many years without reinstalling.