Well, that's why there's the smxi script. If there's potential breakage in a package, then it will give you a big warning about it first and hold it back until it's redeemed stable enough for use. But yes, it's certainly not for the newbie.

Actually with the very detailed manual and friendly support in the forums/irc sidux is just as newbie friendly as say PCLOS, I would say more so than the *buntus. It is much more stable than Kanotix used to be, kano is great and I got my start using linux with Kanotix. But he does/did tend to create hacks/fixes that weren't maintainable in the long run and they caused things to break.

Sidux is definitely more user friendly than Sid!

The smxi script when upgrading your system is a nice experience. With Sid you have to be slightly paranoid when upgrading. What will break?
Smxi seems to take care of some potentially system breaking behaviour. Latest xorg for instance was put on hold because of reported problems.

I always wonder why use anything else than Debian if you like it. I tested Sidux and it did not impress me at all. Common sense should prevail if you use unstable, and that's that. Stick to Debian, just like people stick to slack and you cannot go wrong.

Sidux IS Debian Sid, just with a few minor adjustments to make the experience go better. The only "unstable" part of Sid is the rapid change of packages, but contrary to popular opinion Sid isn't filled with alpha or beta software. That's what experimental is for.

What is the benefit of using Sid over Etch?

Newer packages. Sid moves fast, therefore, you get pretty much the latest software, such as the latest linux kernel, wesnoth, etc. If you want the latest and greatest, Sid has it. If you need rock solid stability, then Etch has it.

Lenny is the testing right now right? So if I use lenny repos would I have the lastest packages too or would stuff be unstable?

You would get the latest packages once they've undergone a period of time in unstable and no new critical bugs are discovered and they can be built on Lenny on all supported architectures without breaking packages already on Lenny.

Unstable gets them first as freshly released from the upstream software maker. Sometimes, like with security related upgrades, they get a 0 or 5 day wait designation where if they haven't been shown to break anything and are installable on Lenny on all architectures they go right in after the 0 or 5 day wait. General packages get marked with a 10 day waiting period.

So if all goes right Lenny gets the new package upgrades usually within 10 days or so.

Some things get past the waiting period and still aren't ready as serious bugs are discovered or they aren't installable on Lenny without other packages also being released into Lenny from Sid. So there's an additional waiting period until all those dependent packages are all installable on Lenny smoothly without breaking stuff and without any new critical bugs turning up.

For me, Lenny is the way to go since it's kept generally in Release Candidate form as far as functionality goes and mostly gets the latest available software for Linux, albeit with a caveat that we wait a bit longer for it and we know it's actually going to install and work and not break anything else by the time we get it in Lenny. I like that.

Sid gets stable software releases but they are direct from manufacturer and not certainly all in sync with the Debian setup and installable on all architectures until worked on while in Sid for a while and possibly patched up a bit with small version increases so bugs are fixed and they become installable on all architectures onto Lenny.

Once all Debian software is installable on Lenny for all architectures and there are no major bugs in them Lenny is frozen and prettied up for the next official Stable release of Debian Stable. After that's done Sid is renamed with another name from Toy Story and becomes testing and a new Sid repo is made. Stable (now Etch) becomes Old Stable and the cycle continues.

It's pretty cool, eh? Stuff in Experimental, by the way, can't even fit into Unstable at that point until worked on a lot. OpenOffice.Org 2.3 is in that state at the moment.