Sparky's stability

[toomanyquestions]

I've been thinking about migrating one of my two older machines to Sparky Linux (one machine runs solydx, the other crunchbang).  However, for the life of me I cannot get past the concern that a Testing-based distro will be too unstable for my taste. I would love to hear about the level of stability one can expect from Sparky.

What sort of problems does one encounter? How much command line knowledge is required? How far from beginner must one be (I'm arguably between beginner and intermediate - I've played with conky & tint2 code, and once I even toyed with a debian netinstall, but I don't have much command line experience).

Any and all opinions are welcome.

[way12go]

You have come to the right place. I used several linux distributions and when I started using sparky I was offered much more than what I can chew, stability stability and stability. I've mind disorder known as Paranoid type Schizophrenia and recently have been using large doses of Niacin vitamin B3,

Niacin and Sparky happened almost at the same period... In this period I've matured from beginner to more or less an intermediate user, all because of stability sparky provided me. Because of Sparky's stability and awesome sparky apps I gained a strong foot hold to learn something extra... nope I am not an expert but I became more and more familiar to linux.

Now, all because of sparky+niacin (a little bit of previous experience) I became good at using linux. Previously I was good at windows and now linux too.

[MoroS]

Let's address this one by one. :)

What sort of problems does one encounter?

As you said: it's based on Testing, so while Testing is more stable and only gets packages that don't kill the whole experience, occasional problems may occur. That being said, most of the time those problems revolve around proprietary drivers (nVidia, ATI, Broadcom), but most of the time you can use the in-kernel open drivers, which work for most hardware configurations (sometimes needing additional firmware files, but that's mostly for network drivers). Other than that, Testing is stable enough for daily use, at least in my opinion. I've been using it more or less (with a full migration to Sparky a couple months back) for around 2 years without any major issues. :)

How much command line knowledge is required?

Not much. Partitioning knowledge would be nice during the installation. Other than that, it's pretty straight-forward and most daily maintainence can be done with GUI tools (like Sparky APTus for upgrading and such).

How far from beginner must one be (I'm arguably between beginner and intermediate - I've played with conky & tint2 code, and once I even toyed with a debian netinstall, but I don't have much command line experience).

Some knowledge would be nice, but not some Linux expert type of knowledge. What I mean are rather habits of using other GUIs than Windows and not expecting another Windows to appear, but since you already used other distros, then you'll be fine. ;)

Also remember, that any problems you may have with Sparky, you can post on the forums. Sparky is basically two architectures: x86 and x86_64, so the amount of problems are limited and there's a good chance, that you'll find an answer to your problem as well. And if not, we're here to solve them. :)

PS. way12go has been posting a lot of tutorial posts lately, so there's a good chance you'll find some of them useful too. :)

@way12go: thanks for your tutorial posts. Some of them will probably hit the Wiki as soon as we get it up and running. :)

[way12go]

Under "Installation" group if we have "How to and tutorial" sub-group and move all such posts here, it will be perfect.

[toomanyquestions]

As you said: it's based on Testing, so while Testing is more stable and only gets packages that don't kill the whole experience, occasional problems may occur. That being said, most of the time those problems revolve around proprietary drivers (nVidia, ATI, Broadcom), but most of the time you can use the in-kernel open drivers, which work for most hardware configurations (sometimes needing additional firmware files, but that's mostly for network drivers). Other than that, Testing is stable enough for daily use, at least in my opinion. I've been using it more or less (with a full migration to Sparky a couple months back) for around 2 years without any major issues. :)

Unhappily, I might have a broadcom driver in one of my laptops. However, your overall assessment makes me feel a bit better.   Hmmm (weighing options).... 

[drew]

I have never had a major issue with sparky. Debian testing is more or less comparable to something like Ubuntu's repos. Again, it's not Cid (unstable). There might be a few (rare) small problems but you are highly unlikely to run into something that will break your system.

[dhinds]

I've been thinking about migrating one of my two older machines to Sparky Linux (one machine runs solydx, the other crunchbang).  However, for the life of me I cannot get past the concern that a Testing-based distro will be too unstable for my taste. I would love to hear about the level of stability one can expect from Sparky.

I have been using an updated and upgraded installation of Sparky Ultra Openbox on my main desktop computer (w/ a 1st generation i7 & 16 mb Ram built in July of 2010) since version 3.2.  I have installed SolydX and Crunchbang on other computers and Sparky is more responsive, has more extensive utilities and repositories, fewer problems with Wine and the rare glitches that do appear are resolved soon on this helpful forum.

I also installed Sparky Openbox 3.6 on a Lenovo ThinkPad W520 (with Manjarobox, openSUSE, Fedora and Calculate installed too) and it is the main system on that computer at present.

I consider Sparky to be the most complete Debian derivative available (and I've used a large number of them).

Several Crunchbang successors have arisen (i.e. crunchbang plus plus, bunsenlabs and Crunchbang-Monara) and Semplice (also Openbox) is based on Debian Unstable (but uses it 's own repositories mainly) are all good (bunsenlabs is still being developed and I haven't tried  Crunchbang-Monara, however), but you can't go wrong w/ Sparky.

[py-thon]

I used Linux Mint and LMDE before and at least in my case Sparky is as stable as those or better.
Last year for some weeks there were issues to do with gtk-packages (I don't remember for sure, might have been other packages). They were annoying but could be lived with. I don't do a complete dist-upgrade too often (maybe every three months) and in the meantime only add security and bug fixes that seem important to me.
But if you want rock solid stability Sparky won't beat Debian Stable  :)