Big mistake. Upgraded to Jessie too soon...

[aplistir]

I made a BIG mistake and upgraded my main machine to Jessie last week. Had to reinstall and come back to wheezy because there are still too many bugs in Jessie.

I thought I knew what I was doing. I had already been playing with jessie on a small partition since february.
And on that partition Jessie had been working well. (hadn't updated it recently though)

I knew that my problematic elantech touchpad just works in Jessie (not so well in wheezy) And screen looks better in Jessie. Don't know why. Colours & contrast just look a bit better in jessie. I have tried adjusting them in wheezy, but can't get them as good as they are in jessie. Maybe Jessie has some updated driver or something.

But the show stoppers for me were:
1. Neither Shut down nor rebooting worked. Propably something to do with systemd. I googled for solutions, and there were some suggestions but I didnt find any that would have worked for me.
2. hd spinned down every 2 seconds even while constantly accessing the hd. eg. while looking a movie from hd. Adjusting hdparm values and unchecking "spin down disk" from power manger didnt make much of a difference.
3. Selecting default application in thunar (I have xfce) didnt work. Eg. if kaffeine or xine were installed it was impossible to have thunar open videos in VLC by default. (uninstalling kaffeine and xine did solve this though..)
Same thing with eg. .txt files. It didnt matter what was seleted as the default aplication. Mousepad was used to open those files..
4. This didn't happen every time, but returning from suspend, when the machine wakes up and screensaver comes on. If I moved the mouse to get out of screensaver the backlight of the screen would go completely OFF. Didnt happen if I pressed space instead of moving the mouse. Sometimes got the backlight back on by adjusting the brightness and sometimes I had to reboot the machine...
5. Jessie gets about 100MB of updates a day, which is quite a lot. While understandable when the feature freeze is aproaching..
6. + some other things I can't remember now.

the 2nd problem of those was the most severe for me. I was worried that my hd would damage or wear out from spinning down and starting the hd every 2 secs.

So moved back to wheezy. The funny thing is that now I got the most annoying thing in wheezy fixed. The main reason, why I decided to upgrade in the first place. The problematic touchpad works now in wheezy too. All I had to do was to install 3.16 -kernel from backports.
Previously I had the 3.14 kernel, and touchpad didnt work with it. (even though on february the same touchpad already worked in jessie, which then used the 3.14 kernel (or older)..)

Just wanted to give a warning to others, who are thinking of upgrading to jessie now that the feature freeze is aproaching... It is still quite buggy...

[robert3242]

It isn't an "upgrade" until Debian releases Jessie as its stable release. Nor is if entirely accurate to say that Jesxie is "buggy." At best that is misleading. Jessie is currently Testing. That means that no one at Debian is yet satisfied that it is ready to take its eventual place as Debian's stable OS, and that bugs and breakages are not only still possible, but to be expected. Casual users should not consider running it before it does become the stable relesae, and certainly not on production machine. It is made available as is only so that people capable of dealing with most problems on their own can take it for a spin and report any remaining bugs they find. There are some, unfortunately including at least one reviewer at DistroWatch, who try to convince others that Testing amounts to Debian's attempt at a "rolling release" distro. The truth, as I've posted there twice now, is that nothing could be further from the truth. Debian does not, and has never released a rolling release distro, nor have I heard so much as a hint that they are considering doing so.

If you want a rock-solid OS, Debian Stable (Wheezy) is the way to go. If that doesn't meet your needs, then you should look elsewhere. If,on the other hand, you hvae the time and expertise to help Debian with bug-hunting, then and only then does running Testing make sense.

[emariz]

Well, I skipped Wheezy altogether and moved from Squeeze plus Backports to Jessie earlier this month. Granted, I had to relearn various of things, some related to systemd, most of them to Gnome Shell, but I have yet to face a critical issue. Say

· Tweak Tool and Dconf Editor are a must to edit even the most basic settings,
· one has to inspect and edit a CSS file to do a simple customisation of the Gnome Shell theme,
· power management notifications should be flashier and persistent,
· there is no way to set when battery power should be considered "low" or "critical",
· laptop automatically suspends on lid closing,
· on my system, upon start, Gnome 3 uses about three times more RAM than Gnome 2 did...

[hgeorg]

(…) t bugs and breakages are not only still possible, but to be expected. Casual users should not consider running it before it does become the stable relesae, and certainly not on production machine. (…) one reviewer at DistroWatch, who try to convince others that Testing amounts to Debian's attempt at a "rolling release" distro. The truth, as I've posted there twice now, is that nothing could be further from the truth. Debian does not, and has never released a rolling release distro, nor have I heard so much as a hint that they are considering doing so.

You are certainly right that it is not Debian's attempt, and that Testing is for people who know what they are doing, and who are prepared for the consequences. (But then I would say that people who do not know what they are doing, should not be using computers at all.)

Yet, in my experience, breakage is rare. I have been running Jessie for a little more than a year, and so far it has been giving me less grief and breakage when upgrading than the six-monthly allegedly stable Ubuntu releases. Hence, from my point of view, Testing is /functionally/ pretty close to a rolling release, even though I would certainly not suggest that it is /intentionally/ so.

I would not necessarily recommend using Testing, and I will not upgrade to Testing when jessie becomes Stable, but I see little point in scaring people off either. No OS or distro is perfect; and every OS and distro I have seen has some annoying flaw. Jessie is not any worse than most stable releases.