Is Jessie worth upgrading to?

[pastet89]

I was unfortunate to have my first Debian distro Wheezy. From what I read it was the first so far to cause lots of headaches during installation while all is set up properly and took me a week to do so, furthermore, after some update my chrome has had an annoying graphic bug which never went away. From what I heard the 6th version was the best and provided fast and simple installation. Anyone with experience with Jessie, would you recommend me upgrading to it or downgrading to Squeeze?

[thanatos_incarnate]

From what I read it was the first so far to cause lots of headaches during installation

Sources? I've had no problems with either Wheezy or Jessie installation on several machines so far. Also, did someone objectively compare the releases and how did they do it?

after some update my chrome has had an annoying graphic bug which never went away.

Chrome is not an officially supported Debian package, so you'll have to report that bug on the Chrome user forums. If you have the same problem with Chromium, you might want to describe your problem further. Then you might search whether this problem has been already reported on the Debian bug tracker. Graphical glitches could be Chromium's problem, but also your video card's or precisely its driver could be causing it. It could also be a bug in Xorg.

From what I heard the 6th version was the best and provided fast and simple installation.

Everyone correct me if I'm wrong, but apart from backend changes, I'm not aware of any new visible features in the installation process since Debian 6.
I've also heard those accounts that stability has gone down the drain and frankly, I can't confirm any of them. Here, Debian has worked like a charm, so I guess it all depends on your own experience and hardware combination.
I'll give you one example: I had an ancient Pentium II that I ran Debian Sarge (3.1) on. When I upgraded to Etch (4.0), graphics became more sluggish and buggy. This is because Etch migrated from X11R6 to Xorg. When I got a better computer, everything worked fine again. I guess my video card was just too old and obscure, so the driver wasn't properly maintained anymore (I think it was one of these Trident video cards back from 1998 or so).

Anyone with experience with Jessie, would you recommend me upgrading to it or downgrading to Squeeze?

Try it four yourself, there's not much to say else. If you have hardware released after 2011, then chances are great Squeeze won't run it well and you'll have to upgrade drivers yourself. If you have an older machine, Squeeze might actually work well for you. It's still supported.

But another tip I want to give you: don't reinstall operating systems just because you have 1 or 2 bugs. Try to solve the bugs first. Mostly, you will find sollutions if you just google them or search this forum.

[dasein]

Since you've implied that you've had hardware issues, there's basically no hope of anyone offering an informed opinion without knowing details about your rig.

Otherwise, whatever advice you get won't be any better than a coin-flip, and the coin-flip method is much quicker and places significantly lower demands on others' time and attention.

[andre@home]

Get a spare disk.... they cost nearly nothing or you may one hanging around an doing nothing....
Well... then start to work/install and within a few hrs you've 99.9% of your answers and... when it is raining you've spent in a very nice way and maybe learned more than asking us...
Good luck with your choices...

[millpond]

I was unfortunate to have my first Debian distro Wheezy. From what I read it was the first so far to cause lots of headaches during installation while all is set up properly and took me a week to do so, furthermore, after some update my chrome has had an annoying graphic bug which never went away. From what I heard the 6th version was the best and provided fast and simple installation. Anyone with experience with Jessie, would you recommend me upgrading to it or downgrading to Squeeze?

You got Wheezy working. Good on ya. Debin is always a challengs and a test of mettle. If you cant break it, you are a member of an exclusive club.

Ignore google - it is an infection. Treated till a cure comes along. Chrome is a beast which permits breaches to security considered inviolable on other browsers. It assumes the right to access your whole file system.
I call it a booger.

For what little its worth: Hold tight and wait till the shitstorm engulfing Debian really subsides. Enjoy Wheezy, its a nice OS I have nothing but fond memories of.

[dotlj]

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer. It depends, as others have said, on what your requirements are.
Desktop? Server? What type of use? For what purpose?
For almost everything that I can think of, the answer is yes. Most people who were running Wheezy have upgraded to Jessie.

Perhaps ask yourself, is there any reason not to upgrade to Jessie?
The answer is probably not.

[somebodyelse]

It depends. One thing to bear in mind though is that via the upgrade you will be moved to systemd by default.

From the release notes:

5.6. Upgrading installs the new default init system for Jessie

Jessie ships with systemd-sysv as default init system. This package is installed automatically on upgrades.

If you have a preference for another init such as sysvinit-core or upstart, it is recommended to set up APT pinning prior to the upgrade. This may also be required if you are upgrading LXC containers before the host. In this case, please refer to Section 5.8.1, “Upgrading LXC guests running on Wheezy hosts”.

As an example, to prevent systemd-sysv from being installed during the upgrade, you can create a file called /etc/apt/preferences.d/local-pin-init with the following contents:

Code: Select all

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

! Caution

Be advised that some packages may have degraded behavior or may be lacking features under a non-default init system.

Please note that the upgrade may install packages containing "systemd" in their name even with APT pinning. These alone do not change your init system. To use systemd as your init system, the systemd-sysv package must be installed first.

If APT or aptitude has issues computing an upgrade path with the pin in place, you may be able to help it by manually installing both sysvinit-core and systemd-shim.

[pastet89]

Sorry for late reply and thanks for your inputs.
I find the advise for trying to fix my Wheezy bugs wisest of all, and what scares me to try myself Jessie is that I am afraid I will lost again a month till I fix everything on 90%, as I already have it on Wheezy.
In short, yes, the Chrome bug is the same in Chromium, and I know the first is not supported while the latter is, so I have tried and googled really a lot for it. Second bug is when I talk on skype with camera the connection goes awful and starts to cut episodically/stutter. And last thing that happened just weeks ago was that after resintalling my HP printer, whenever I turn it on it starts to print endlessly (as far as I remember some test pages), clearing tasks does not seem to help.
Seems I will have to take some time to clear these as I really prefer initially not to risk building everything from scratch. Strange that for some folks everything is working out of the box, even with Wheezy - that was just not the case with me.

My rig is relatively new or at least I bought it less than a year ago. I have AMD video card and AMD processor.