Hi guys, i use Stable after being very turned off by Ubuntu 10.10, and i love stable; the older software doesn't bother me very much, and the little it does, is easily fixed with a few backports, and my stableness seems to be fine. The only things i've backported are the kernel, xorg and iceweasel.
Curiosity has gotten the better of me, since Ubuntu is based on Debian sid, just wondering, how does Ubuntu compare with Debian sid in terms of stableness.

My vote goes to sid as being the stabler of the two (vs. Ubuntu development branch.)

Need to clarify a couple of things before we start.

Ubuntu LTS versions are based on Debian Testing, regular Ubuntu versions are based on Sid + a couple of bits and pieces from Experimental.

I used to be a die hard Ubuntu development tester and while I never really had many problems I find my current Debian Sid/Experimental installation much more stable than Ubuntu development. I would also say that when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS come out it took me a week to get a workable system, 10.10 was also about a week, 11.04 I never got past Alpha 3 and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth.

I personally think if you are contemplating running Debian Testing or Sid that you carefully read the Debian pages regarding these distributions, be willing to have some problems, have the ability to work through them, and report your findings to Debian through the Bug Tracking System.

Well, such questions are usually highly subjective, so you'll get different answers on who you ask. But I feel that the definition of "stability" needs to be clarified.

Sid by itself isn't necessarily buggy or corrupt. The software that gets imported into Sid is not beta software, it's all usually current with whatever's upstream. Alpha and beta software usually gets imported into experimental. What makes Sid unstable is that it has a constantly changing base, which can mean that some packages will have incorrect dependencies. Ask someone who's had to update xorg on Sid and you'll see what I mean. (Usually it means that apt will want to remove everything until everything gets resolved a few days later)

Ubuntu, by taking software from Sid, will also inherit this same definition. What tends to make Ubuntu buggy for some people are the components that Canonical and other Ubuntu developers do themselves. This includes their own changes as well as their own software, such as Unity. That's what I regard as the primary difference is that Sid is basically up-to-date upstream software whereas Ubuntu includes some products that aren't as well tested.

So, what does that mean for the end-user? The advantage of Ubuntu is that once it's released, the software stays there, so you don't have to worry about wine or fglrx disappearing from the repositories due to a dependency issue. The downside is that you'll usually have to wait a month or so before all of the bugs are worked out.

Sid +1

Put it this way I installed Debian sid on my desktop back in 2004, it has been happily running along smoothly ever since; with daily apt-get dist-upgrade.

Try doing that with Ubuntu.

1 members found this post helpful.

Like k3lt01 I have to admit as a disclaimer that I am a disgruntled Ubuntu user and dev release tester.

Go with Sid or Testing. There will be some rough spots but I have only had one short stretch of needing to be careful with my testing (main OS) and my Sid install since last November. That patch is right now as a matter of fact.

It is, over all, a much more reliable OS than even the Ubuntu LTS releases (at least for the first couple months) and as up to date as the Ubuntu regular releases.

You should install apt-listbugs before doing any update/upgrade cycles. This is a package Ubuntu should adopt.

Debian Sid is unstable. This means it is in a state of constant change, sometimes updates come several times a day. Another word for this is "rolling release."

Ubuntu is stable. This means once it is released, all software packages are "frozen" at their current version, with only maintenance updates like bug fixes and security patches.

Personally if I had to choose between Ubuntu and Debian Sid, I would choose Sid.

If by stable you mean that most of the time it does what you want it to and does not give you headaches then I would say Sid (which is what I use now on both my machines). However, if you want to just update indiscriminately Sid could give you problems at times, though any problems are usually fixed within a few days or you may be able to fix them yourself sooner. But if you do just a little checking before updating you can usually avoid problems and Sid can be very stable.

I have Sid going for about 4 years now with minimal problems which I was able to fix almost immediately.

Sid and testing are pretty solid in fact but require that the user be more hands on. For example it's probably ok to set up a cron job to run updates when running stable, but that would be a bad idea in testing and unstable. The name "unstable" puts off a lot of potential users but it's really very usable. Personally I prefer unstable to testing.

I have to admit to being a chicken. I am using testing as my main OS.

On this same drive I have an install of Sid. Have no more problems with it than I do testing. If I had known that when I set up this drive I would probably gone with Sid.