Wheezy vs Jessie experience

[Wheelerof4te]

Debian 8 Jessie is Stable for a while now, and I think it's good time to share your experience with it. Does it work well? How does it behave on your machine? Do you feel the difference after upgrading from Wheezy?

Wheezy was the first Debian I have installed (in the middle of last year) and it kinda grew on me. It was stable, snappier than Windows XP and just cool. Music played well, videos too and browsing felt natural with Iceweasel. Of course, fearing the dreaded ''software incompatibility'', I still used MS Office to do my college work. There were other minor annoyances, mainly banking issues.

Then suddenly, more I learned about Debian, the more I wanted to ''track testing'', ''install newer software'', ''complain about (phantom) slow performance'' and all that familiar stuff. So I upgraded. And failed. Computer couldn't reboot, nor shut down. It was during freeze, so no major breakage happened, thankfully. After reinstalling Wheezy and release of Jessie as stable, I tried again. Same thing happened. I was frustrated, so had to do some distro hopping back to Ubuntu.

Finally, after clean Jessie install, everything seemed fine. But, not for long. I learned about Systemd and it's creator's plans for GNU/Linux. Guess what i did? That's right, I had reverted to Wheezy. Then I read about systemd some more. What does Systemd mean to me as an ordinary user of GNU/Linux? Not much, so I installed Jessie again and decided not to care since.

TL;DR: So, what is your experience with Jessie and do you think it's better than time you spent with Wheezy?

[edbarx]

These VS threads have the bad tendency of acting like flame baits. We will see about this one here.

[Wheelerof4te]

Feel free to close it when and if it becomes like that. No need for flame war, I ask only about your experience in using current and old stable version (like the one I wrote).

[chrissywissy]

Dunno what sys admins think, but the desktop experience isn't much different to me apart from (some) newer software in the repos. I've listened to the arguments about systemd, but it doesn't appear to have any effect on the machines I've got. Boot actually seems a tad slower, but I've never timed it.

I'm happy to stick with Jessie/Gnome for the foreseeable future....

[spacex]

It's a better experience for me, as I have new hardware. As for the user-interface and stuff I can not really compare, as I always do custom netinstalls and never use any DE. But of course, Jessie is old news for me, as I've run Sid for 4-5 years straight...

[steve_v]

On the desktop/workstation: Jessie has been just fine so far, some new stuff is nice but mostly it's same-old reliable Debian stable. Upgrade from Wheezy was smooth and you'd have to look pretty close to spot the difference, especially since the big init change is practically invisible to the user.
Server-side, I'm hanging on to Wheezy until a) the systemd dust has completely settled and b) I figure out how to use it properly and port all my custom init scripts over.

[millpond]

On a clean install nearly every distro works. Especially on newer (but not too new machines).

The test of the mettle of an os is seeing if it can withstand an *upgrade* process on an *older* machine with a *large* Install.
Here Squeeze through Wheezy did just fine. Jessie started breaking things, but not the system itself. To me, Debian is unbreakable.

In comparison, Ubuntu is totally breakable.

I run this system with innumerable scripts, and Jessie/systemd started breaking them, and some were directly damaged, Windows style.
If I KNEW what was coming, I would probably switched to Gentoo/Funtoo, or another compiler based system. And only upgraded as needed.
But life is too short to start afresh with this system. And I cannot tolerate systemd, though the shim makes it bearable, but not really satisfactory.

So, on this end Wheezy was *better* than Jesse, but for a newer machine used mainly for web/multimedia consumption, Jessie would certainly have more advantages, especially with drivers. For a decently hacked system, with many traditional scripts to fully customize the system, this advantage may disappear, though.

[michapma]

Wheezy was in all respects reliable. It hummed right along from the upgrade, and I am thinking here of my home desktop, which I have continually upgraded without reinstall from Etch in 2007. The biggest deal for me on Wheezy was the transition to Gnome 3, which I think Debian handled gracefully despite all the furor. There was also the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, but to me personally that saga has just been an issue of Debian having a worthy free software suite; I don’t actually use it all that frequently. The Lenovo T60 we use for recording at church is still happily running Wheezy, as is my mom’s desktop.

The Jessie affair started with my wife’s Dell laptop when she was in testing. (I’m talking about Jessie.) I liked the evolution of Gnome, LibreOffice and so on, but was relieved when Jessie went stable, because the occasional breakage after an upgrade was annoying to my wife. Jessie stable has been as sensational for her as Wheezy was for me.

I have come to associate Jessie on my home desktop with problems, although Jessie herself is not to blame. Since shortly after the upgrade, I have had an ongoing issue with pauses 20 to 30 seconds long, in which even the mouse cursor doesn’t move, that occurs most frequently when using Iceweasel, LibreOffice, Scribus and GIMP. It always resolves itself, but was happening frequently. There was little improvement switching from Gnome to KDE or XFCE. I originally thought a component of my eight-year-old hardware is starting to give up the ghost, because the same happens under Sid and similar pauses occur in Windows. Now, however, I think it is the nVidia driver. I switched to the nouveau driver a few days ago and haven’t experienced any pauses, although Gnome animations don’t render as smoothly as before. So Jessie is only guilty by association, and in fact she is as wonderful as Wheezy. I am gratified to have the newer software under Jessie.

The greatest aspect for me under Jessie is excellent font rendering. It is a big deal to me to finally be able to stop thinking about how to improve font rendering. After applying Infinality, which ironically is not in Jessie’s repos, the fonts look better than any other desktop system I have ever seen; better than Windows by far, better than Ubuntu, and better than Mac, though my experience on the latter is fairly limited.

Jessie is also running nicely on an older machine at work, where it does mysteriously lock up from time to time. So far it hasn’t been a priority to troubleshoot.

[NFT5]

At this point in time, for the situations where I have employees (or my wife) operating PCs I'm running Wheezy exclusively, as I am on the server. On my own machines I've been running dual boot with Jessie but there are still some issues with freezing that I haven't yet resolved, so there is no way I'm releasing Jessie beyond those machines. On a fairly new notebook with UEFI Jessie runs beautifully so it may be hardware issues on the others. Don't know yet but I'm in no hurry.

From an interface perspective I've set Jessie up almost the same as Wheezy to there is very little difference but some things, like the changes in various menus are annoying and I must say I'm underwhelmed by the changes in many of the applications that I use regularly. Some others, that I also use regularly, aren't available in Jessie and I have some issues with that.

Frankly I'd like to see Wheezy become LTS. I'd just stick with it then.

[spacex]

At this point in time, for the situations where I have employees (or my wife) operating PCs I'm running Wheezy exclusively, as I am on the server. On my own machines I've been running dual boot with Jessie but there are still some issues with freezing that I haven't yet resolved, so there is no way I'm releasing Jessie beyond those machines. On a fairly new notebook with UEFI Jessie runs beautifully so it may be hardware issues on the others. Don't know yet but I'm in no hurry.

From an interface perspective I've set Jessie up almost the same as Wheezy to there is very little difference but some things, like the changes in various menus are annoying and I must say I'm underwhelmed by the changes in many of the applications that I use regularly. Some others, that I also use regularly, aren't available in Jessie and I have some issues with that.

Frankly I'd like to see Wheezy become LTS. I'd just stick with it then.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

This should give you a couple more years. No need to hurry unless you're feeling it

[vicshrike]

Works great both of them. Why shouldn't it? It is Debian stable after all.

[thanatos_incarnate]

Same as every Debian release: newer package versions, otherwise no big changes for a desktop user like me.
Stable, reliable and rich as ever. And as always, if you have very recent hardware, then the kernel and/or some other
components tend to be a bit old and, at least for novice users, a bit tricky to update.
I find systemd commands easier, it also boots better on my machines. YMMV.
But I have little knowledge of system startup, nor do I have ideological issues with it, so I guess I'm not a good critic.

[Nili]

Debian provides stability

I had very good experience using Wheezy for almost 2 years, I am very pleased currently with Jessie.

[Bulkley]

Wheezy is solid as a rock. My impression with Jessie (when I tried it) is that it is unfinished but I don't think that it is really as much a Jessie problem as with contrib software from outside suppliers not being ready. The situation may have improved by now.

On this forum we are seeing a rash of shiny-new-stuff syndrome. Victims feel compelled to mix Jessie repositories with those from Squeeze, Sid, *buntu, ppa and a mysterious collection of non-Debian tip forums. The result is that their Jessie experience is tainted.

[NFT5]

Wheezy is solid as a rock. My impression with Jessie (when I tried it) is that it is unfinished

Yes, my impression too.

This should give you a couple more years. No need to hurry unless you're feeling it

Thanks. I'm in so little hurry that I hadn't even followed that up and kept up to date on LTS status. Good news, for me, though. I'll stick with Wheezy for another year or two until Jessie matures a little more. Like the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

[No_windows]

Wheezy looks old to me. I started with Jessie, Though, and I don't know my way around like many of you, However. I did manage to break Wheezy, too...... I fully enabled backports, and used my Jessie source.list only modified enough to look at Wheezy, but still had a few other repos enabled without the keys. It's probably fixable, as the only problem is that Synaptic is stuck on a few upgrades. It's just a VM that I created for the purpose of exploring.

[jmgibson1981]

I started my linux journey with Wheezy a number of years ago. I have distro hopped for awhile and come full circle back to Debian stable again, Jessie this time. It has been a dream to run. I had much trouble getting systemd to launch my minecraft and terraria servers on my htpc / server. Solved that recently. Other than that I am enjoying myself with it. Granted it's only been a couple days with Debian in my life again but it has given me tons of free time again. I was always researching and googling to fix this or that seemingly every day with Kubuntu. Everything worked out of the box, or was a quick fix after a bit of googling and searching a few forums. Notably wifi drivers, bluetooth isn't installed by default, and as mentioned my few issues with systemd on my server. Otherwise it was a breeze to install, runs like a boss and everything works.

[dotlj]

Jessie is good, Wheezy was good, so was Squeeze. So was Lenny and Etch and Sarge in their time.
I can't even remember what changed now from Wheezy to Jessie.
I looking forward to Stretch, probably using KDE5. From what I've seen of others with KDE5 it's nice.
The change from KDE3 to KDE4 took a long time to adjust for many users.
The newer 4.2 kernel has some nice features that I'm looking forward to seeing.
A couple of releases ago some extra steps appeared in the installer when encrypting partitions.
Jessie has a useful encrypted LVM option during installation. I can't remember if Wheezy had that.

Every now and again I have a quick look at other distros, usually because someone asks me what I think of them.
Every time I compare them to Debian stable and have never thought briefly that any has a nice feature that I like more.
In my opinion, the installers of most distros try to do too much and don't allow very much choice in how to install.

[Roel63]

The newer 4.2 kernel has some nice features that I'm looking forward to seeing.

You can install the newer kernel from Jessie-Backports. No need to wait

[spacex]

In my opinion, the installers of most distros try to do too much and don't allow very much choice in how to install.

That's because those distros aren't made for people who are able to do a custom Debian or Arch-install. They are intended for common pc-users that needs a 100% fully configured and functional desktop enviroment/UI right out of the box. Those users doesn't want to have to make to many choices themselves. If they can change the wallpaper, then their user choices are taken care of. They do not want to do much more than that.