this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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This is not how Debian works .. at .. all.
Source: I've used it for 25 years.
Agreed. Pushing 20 years now myself. Miss debian-administration.com like Hell
I've been told plenty of times that when I had bugs that weren't getting fixed that "stability means no unexpected changes, not uptime, compile the package yourself if you need it fixed."
There are plenty of examples of upstream projects asking debian to not package their stuff because they get bug reports for things that were fixed months ago.
Debian does not ship bugfixes. Debian only ships security fixes.
If something works, it's not going to break. But if something doesn't work, it's not going to unless you fix it yourself by going outside of the official packages.
That's bollocks. Bookworm has received 11 point release updates, and they were definitely not only security updates. Read through the the 12.1 release notes, for example. "Fix playing of custom alarm sounds" does not sound like a security fix, nor a severe issue.
Security updates are released frequently, often just days apart, to individual packages. https://www.debian.org/security/
Point release updates (12.1, 12.2, up to 12.11) are released several months apart. They are thoroughly tested and verified to work together.
Ok? "You only have to wait a few months for this crash to be resolved." still doesn't resolve people's issues.
“Fix playing of custom alarm sounds” doesn't sound like a severe issue to you, but it was also something that if someone needed, they were forced to wait a few months.
Debian would rather have broken custom alarm sounds for several months, even if it was fixed earlier. Fixing a bug to me lands closer to a security issue than "shipping bleeding edge feature sets".
It ultimately means if something you need is broken for a non-security reason, it is not being fixed until the next point release. There is a fixed unit of time in which you know your problem will not be resolved.
Packages are individually updated for security fixes. Individual packages are NOT updated for bugfixes.
Did Debian hurt you or something? You're just raging for the sake of rage.
I've also used Debian on my computer for decades and rarely did any application crash. It's just not a thing. Well... I had FreeCAD crash regularly. But it did that for years and on any distribution. Other than that I did stuff on Debian all day every day and it was just fine.
I'm not raging and I'm not even saying that Debian is bad. I've just been told MANY times over the years (including on Lemmy), when I've commented about bugs and issues I've had on Debian, that stability doesn't mean "without bugs, always upright" it means "not moving, not changing."
Debian has a very specific use case. And when people say Debian is stable they mean the base platform isn't going to change under you and suddenly a config file doesn't work anymore because Package v2.0 uses a different format.
This is good for people who want a low maintenance system that won't unexpectedly break due to a random Windows update.
This is good for probably the vast majority of people that fall under "normal" computing habits. If there was a major groundbreaking bug that affected everyone, it probably would have been caught in testing.
This is not good for people who have quirky computing needs or otherwise do things in slightly niche ways, IF a bug shows up. Some bugs are minor annoyances, some require different workflows to get around.
But ultimately, people should know that if they are experiencing an issue with Debian, and it's not just a configuration issue, they either need to have a solution for themselves (recompiling), or switch distros.
I personally stopped using Debian for my desktop around linux 3.16 days, but I do still use it for my home servers (where I don't want to be updating things constantly). If Debian works as a desktop platform for you, that's awesome.
But OP was having issues with Debian. So OP should know that due to Debian's unchanging nature, it will be quite a while before things start working. And they shouldn't expect otherwise. And that's ok, their use case is going to just be a bit more bleeding edge.
Yes, that's how a stable release cycle works and not at all specific to Debian. Also, not at all what you said before:
Obviously it doesn't get updates as quickly as a rolling release would, bit this just isn't true.