[rand_flip_bit]

I think part of this stability stems from the upstream repos being more stable themselves (cheaper and easier than ever to run CI, quality of tools, etc). It's not often that upstream packages break their stable releases, or heck even develop/master.

It also seems like the firehose of upgrades that is Sid/Experimental has slowed down a bit. Even Sid is still on nodejs 18 and not 20 or 21. The same version as both Testing and Stable.

I feel at home at home with Debian Testing, not as bleeding edge as Arch for sure, but I think that is more of a blessing than a curse. The Debian maintainers seem to know what they are doing and the distribution has a sense or maturity that some others lack. I just hope an update won't break GRUB on me :)

Only downsides to running Debian Testing is that it doesn't get security updates with the same speed as Sid or Stable, and third parties don't exactly put together and distribute pre-built packages for Testing specifically. I understand why, but it makes me wonder if things will break due some ABI compatibility issue down the line. Maybe once Debian 13 is released I'll just stick to stable.

[bayindirh]

You're absolutely right, but that's one side of the coin. Debian also has matured its processes a lot, and they have a much bigger infrastructure now, so they patch tons of packages invisibly, and reproducibly build them, and I think some maintainers do their own suite of tests.

Debian 12 release is relatively new. Also we're in fall now. Package upgrade speed will take up in the next 12 months, reaching its top speed in 8 months if they keep up the usual schedule. I already can run two upgrades in a day, and get ~400 package updates in a couple of weeks. So testing is rolling pretty solidly now.

It's a bummer that security service for testing is discontinued now, but it's only natural. The project got too big, and the attacks are evolving faster than ever, so security people have so much time and staff to handle this.

I didn't experience any ABI compatibility problems with closed source or external software with Debian testing. I'm running Pagico, InSync, StarUML, etc. which are Deb packages and all of them are built against Debian stable or Ubuntu. They work without any problems. Well, Pagico needs libjpeg, but that's another thing unrelated to ABI.