Im running sarge on my laptop at work.
Im thinking of maybe upgrade to etch, is it stable enough to use at work? Whats your experiences?

http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

Generally it runs well, but be prepared to invest some time if they are making changes to the system. During development on Sarge for example, they changed the way you load iptables at boot. Such things can be nasty surprises.

Hmm, thats not what you want when you dont have the time at work to fix it. But its a lot stable than sid I guess?, cause it was 6 months since sarge were released as stable release, and etch started to be developed at that time. Because what I understand in SID you cant sometimes not even start X?

I recently did a dist-upgrade on one or two of my desktop machines. I can't even remember whether it was one or two, so smooth it went

One of the machines is a weird hodgepodge, it was the first Debian machine I ever installed. I started with a Woody installation and run an mixed Woody/Sarge/Sid system. I did a dist-upgrade to Sarge once. Now I did dist-upgrade to "testing", no problems whatsoever. It is my regular desktop machine at home, so I use it a lot.

Loading iptables at boot-up? Does it normally run on a regular machine? I have a few machines running as firewall, and I arranged the start of iptables myself in a script file. Can't imagine that a different distro would change that.

jlinkels

Etch is as stable, if not more stable, than regular releases by other Distributions (i.e. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.).
I don't think you'll have any problems running Etch. Just make sure you install apt-listbugs. That way when you upgrade a package you'll know if there are any associated bugs and then you can choose not to install it.
Apt-listbugs is a must for testing and sid users.
I am currently running sid on my desktop with no problems. But I am willing to read bug reports

apt-listbugs is that a software package? or a command?, I will check on that on Monday.
I did an apt-get dist-upgrade from sarge to etch it worked fine

Regarding atp-listbug or apt-list-bug:
OK I checked it out its a tool/command that you run before upgrade to see if its safe to upgrade

It's also a package you install.

To install apt-listbugs, do "apt-get install apt-listbugs". Apt-listbugs will be invoked automatically every time you use apt-get or aptitude (maybe with synaptic too, I don't know because I don't use synaptic) and it will list bugs that have been reported against the packages you're about to install. It will also give you the opportunity to cancel installation if you so decide.

Apt-listbugs also tells you the current status of the reported bug: <open> or <done>. The bugs marked as <done> have already been fixed and those packages should be safe to install. If a bug is marked as <open>, you will need to consider if it actually affects your system. Some bugs only affect specific architectures. And some bug reports cannot be reproduced on other machines. But it's good to know if some people have experienced problems with a package because it MIGHT cause problems on your machine, too. However, developers try their best to keep any release critical bugs out of Debian testing.

After installing apt-listbugs you can read an introduction with "more /usr/share/doc/apt-listbugs/README.Debian" (or you can use less instead of more if you have it installed). There's also a man page for apt-listbugs (man apt-listbugs) and doing (as root) "apt-listbugs -h" will show you the command line syntax and list the available options. But, as I already said, all you actually need to do is just install apt-listbugs and it will be invoked automatically every time you install new packages via apt-get or aptitude.

Thanks all, it seems like it is a good thing to have installed, I will def. try it out!