| From: Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Long release cycles are a real mixed blessing ... <sigh> Thanks for your note on debian 12 / bookworm. I'm personally interested in debian as a replacement for CentOS. (GTALUG is going to have a speaker from Rocky Linux in the next few months.) I'm not enculturated in the debian world, but my impression is: - debian stable is about the same as RHEL. Very stable, very old. Suitable for those who value stability. - debian testing is pretty reliable. Perfectly fine on ones desktop. - debian unstable is more of an adventure Ideologically, isn't FF ESR a match for debian stable? If you want firefox, isn't that an indication that you are a candidate for "testing". I don't like snaps / flatpacks much. For reasons that we don't need to go over. But your situation might be a great use: you want a stable OS but need very select exceptions. ================== We (GTALUG) run a debian stretch server that has fallen out of support. It falls on me (among others) to kick it forward. I was under the impression that the automated updating process is more recent then that. Is there a royal road to bookworm from stretch? My guess is that it gets complicated by out-of-distro things that we have installed.

On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 at 23:04, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

| From: Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| Long release cycles are a real mixed blessing ... <sigh>

Thanks for your note on debian 12 / bookworm.

I'm personally interested in debian as a replacement for CentOS. (GTALUG is going to have a speaker from Rocky Linux in the next few months.)

I'm not enculturated in the debian world, but my impression is:

- debian stable is about the same as RHEL. Very stable, very old. Suitable for those who value stability.

- debian testing is pretty reliable. Perfectly fine on ones desktop.

I used to use testing on my desktops, up until ... five years ago? I found it had become less stable, less reliable at that point, and my appetite for new software wasn't as great anymore. I haven't tested recently.

- debian unstable is more of an adventure

If you wait a month between updates, unstable will routinely download over a Gigabyte of updated packages. I found it unusable on the desktop.

Ideologically, isn't FF ESR a match for debian stable?

If you want firefox, isn't that an indication that you are a candidate for "testing".

Stability is great, and I mostly agree. But this (and their ancient version of Strapi) are the only two places where that dedication to old software has caused me personal grief. Of course, I'm using my own needs as the measuring scale ... it's the one I care about. :-)

I don't like snaps / flatpacks much. For reasons that we don't need to go over. But your situation might be a great use: you want a stable OS but need very select exceptions.

==================

We (GTALUG) run a debian stretch server that has fallen out of support. It falls on me (among others) to kick it forward. I was under the impression that the automated updating process is more recent then that.

Is there a royal road to bookworm from stretch?

My guess is that it gets complicated by out-of-distro things that we have installed.

The big question is, is this a cloud VM or real iron? Because my response would be to spin up another VM and re-install everything on Bookworm to see if it worked. This also gives you time because you can keep the old machine running in parallel. Time you don't have when you're working on your own box because you want that back up now ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history Stretch is apparently still supported, and will be for a while. But I would encourage you to upgrade ASAP. In place if you have to (as Znoteer says, don't skip versions), separate VM if you can. And yes, out-of-distro stuff is likely to break because of the changing set of libraries and compiler builds in the OS around it. I have to rebuild my Python venv every time I re-install Debian - happily only for one project, it would be nasty for multiple projects. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com

On Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 08:35:38PM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:

I've upgraded something like six of about 10 personal (Debian 11) machines. The upgrade process is the easiest and smoothest that Debian's managed yet. I haven't tried a new install yet, but if you have a Debian 11 system, my experience so far suggests that the upgrade process will go smoothly.

I was annoyed to find that this doesn't - exactly - bump the Firefox version. You remain trapped in the ESR version, and even though it's a newer ESR release, it's still FF v102 which Slack will be disabling in September. We use Slack heavily at work - I could survive without it running in the browser on my Linux machines, but I'd much rather not. Further research yielded the suggestion that version 114 will become ESR in August ... I hope Debian will let that out the gate before Slack's September deadline, but I wonder if they will. They don't like big version changes in the middle of a release. I guess I'll be peering into the backports repository if that's what happens ... (don't suggest flatpak or snaps, thanks - I avoid those when possible).

Well at this time I see https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firefox-esr shows that buster, bullseye and bookworm all have version 102 ESR. I believe they will update it as a security update when the ESR moves to a new version.

The only other thing I was really concerned about with Debian's versioning was Strapi, another work thing. Debian 11 had the ancient version 12 which the developers at work refused to work with. As their systems administrator, that caused me major headaches. Debian has now jumped to version 18 of Strapi.

Long release cycles are a real mixed blessing ... <sigh>

I can't even find a package named strapi in debian. No idea what it is. -- Len Sorensen