I would caution those who think that the upgrade from Sarge to Etch will be slick and painless. Xfree86 -> Xorg is a pain in the rear. If you are doing a new install, do yourself a favor and just install Etch, odds are good that you'll end up doing a clean install after you try to upgrade anyways.

I have noticed this also. I guess the gnome folks have taken the criticism to heart.

Posted by war1025:
This is why I'm waiting for the upgrade path to be completed in the hope that all will go well. I'm not kidding myself, however, and I half expect to be doing a fresh install of Lenny.

I'm a bit sorry for general because he's so pleased with his OS and it could all be borked so soon. But you wouldn't know not to install Sarge just now if you're a newbie, or just new to Debian.

Works nicely as my desktop thank you very much. :-)

History shows that testing tends to go a bit loopy after a fresh stable release so you may want to hold off on that for a while...

Originally posted by Pebcak:
It works very well on mine but I'd just like some of the newer package versions around.

In fairness to rickh, he plays with Sid so I expect he'll find any stable version unexciting by comparison.

To put Sarge in context, it beats the crap out of most other distros I've tried.

Sarge IS a great build. I cut my teeth on it as did many other people on this forum. It is an excellent desktop environment. That goes without saying. However, the time has come that it is no longer probably the BEST choice for a beginner with debian. Yes, we can hope that the sarge -> etch conversion will be flawless, but what if it isn't? If you already have a stable system and it's working for you, by all means wait for etch to go stable. But, if you are doing a clean install anyways, it would be foolish not to go with etch at this point, and I think most people would agree with me on that point.

Posted by war1025:
Agreed! That would be my advice right now.