Since Debian is in GNOME3 transition period, after last dist-upgrade I lived on bare minimum of GNOME DE and its apps. basically all I had working right was Chromium and Terminal, instead of Rhythmbox I used mpg321, instead of Gedit it was Vim and so on, which is all fine except the fact it had me living in 2000 again.

It was all due to python-gtk2 version that was missing in Sid repositories. Furthermore, as I was unable to restart X and had my notebook on suspend after every login I had to retype my wifi passphrase due to a bug in gnome-keyring. I believe I did my part, reported the bugs and waited maintainers responsible for those packages to do something. But this “situation” went on for 8 days.

I remember the times when you couldn’t fire up X for weeks, but after those days Unstable has gained reputation that it’s not like that anymore, but after having a situation like this one, it makes me wonder.

Please, don’t take this the wrong way, I mean no harm but the ultimate question that is brought up here is … is this the price of bleeding edge?

*Update

As many of you came down on me with anger, let me say couple of things. First of all, when I first wrote this post I was kind of using it for venting. Second of all original title was “Price of freedom” as it sounds too confrontational and for some misleading I had it changed to “Price of bleeding edge”. What happened above could’ve been avoided if I used safe-upgrade instead of dist-upgrade, as at the time I was just too tired and wasn’t paying enough attention to the list of all the packages that are going to be removed.

I use Sid for few years now, and am of a opinion if used with attention it is the the best bleeding edge/devel distro out there. I wasn’t ranting and am still of opinion that things like this need to be discussed among us, of course we can just stick to the line “debian is the best” and we’re not going anywhere. Maybe I did go over the line with this attempt of positive criticism, but I really don’t see nothing wrong with what I did here, as one of items from Debian Social Contract is “We Won’t Hide Problems” thus let’s talk about it.

Again, I apologize if I offended anyone, as point of this whole post wasn’t of such nature.