[e12e]

> it's absolutely chaotic as everyone is applying patches all over the place to get them in before the freeze.

No, it's not. That said, if you want to run Debian testing, do yourself a favour and also install apt-listbugs -- it'll hook into apt, and alert if the update has any bugs filed against it (the update you are installing, that is).

I recently moved my laptop from Debian/stable w/backports to Jessie (testing) -- and it's been fine (had to do a reinstall anyway due to shifting around partitions, because I needed more space for windows so I could create an installer for windows 8.1 -- didn't have enough free space to ... don't get me started).