Debian Squeeze set for Stable release on Feb. 5 or 6 - it's a distro you shouldn't ignore

From the debian-devel-announce mailing list comes word that since the Release Candidate 2 version of the debian-installer is imminent, that means it looks like Feb. 5 or 6 as the date for Debian Squeeze, the project's current Testing distribution, to be officially released, at which time Squeeze will be Debian's Stable distribution.

Once Squeeze is declared Stable (capital "S"), Debian Lenny officially becomes Old Stable and will receive an additional year of security patches before it reaches its end of life.

As I've observed more than a few times, while Debian adheres to no fixed schedule on releases per its "release when ready" philosophy, observation over the past few releases (Sarge, Etch, Lenny and now Squeeze) reveals a roughly two-year gap between Stable releases.

Not bad, I think. While Debian, by the nature of the way its put together, is generally older than, say, a Ubuntu (and especially a Fedora) release right out of the gate, I find the two-year window to be a very good one. For one thing, you can really see differences in the distribution between releases, yet there's almost nothing in a stable Debian release that hasn't been torture-tested in one form or another by thousands of users who prefer more bleeding-edge environments.

This is great on the server, but not so bad on the desktop either. Squeeze, for instance, with its 2.6.32 kernel, treats my ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video chip with the "respect" it deserves (and so unceremoniously lost in 2.6.34+ kernels in other distributions) by allowing it to actually display working video with the open-source ati/radeon driver.

Alas, that kernel doesn't include a new-enough ALSA driver to solve my woeful Conexant sound chip's headphone-jack-muting issue, but either a newer kernel (2.6.34+) or a newer ALSA driver built from source (I need 1.0.23, Squeeze's kernel includes 1.0.21 even though ALSA itself is at 1.0.23) should solve this issue when I get around to hacking on it again.

I've been running Squeeze since late November, and in those nearly two months it's been a relatively wonderful experience.

And given the way Debian is maintained (i.e. nothing new to break ... or fix ... what's in the Stable distribution, security updates notwithstanding), the goodness my Lenovo G555 laptop enjoys under Squeeze will continue — if I so wish — until the next Debian Testing release is declared Stable plus one year.

It's like a frozen-in-time Linux insurance policy.

I'd like to think I've been "doing" open source long enough (starting roughly in early 2007) that I won't be as tempted to bolt back to the extreme bleeding edge of Fedora or the still alpha-tagged Ubuntu's six-month releases. I very well might.

But since I've spent all of 2009 and 2010 running BSD and Linux desktops most of the time, and I'm using these OSes to get "real" work done (to the best of my ability), and given the trouble I've had with these systems between oceans of sanity/usability, the fact that Debian Squeeze runs so very well on this particular laptop (as well as on so many other machines I've had and have), the temptation to stick with it for the next six to 12 months is very strong.

Just about all of my environment, software/application-wise is doing well. I don't have suspend/resume working (again ...), but a newer kernel could change that, or I could live without it, as I do.

Debian is fast, as stable as Stable is, relatively conservative in terms of the technologies it relies on (again, in Stable, not so much in Sid and Experimental), complete (25,000+ packages), not tied to a commercial entity yet as enterprise-ready as anything, as universal as its tagline promises (I've run it on PowerPC, not so successfully on 32-bit SPARC with Sarge, but on all manner of x86 hardware always successfully).

Debian is reliable. Did I say fast? I did. And it's ready now (and has been extremely stable for the past many, many months even though the project itself will only call it as such sometime in the next two weeks, give or take).

Not that I'm giving up on everything else. I still have Ubuntu running on one machine (10.04, on which I fixed the Annoying ScreenSaver Bug), Debian Lenny on another, with my Thinkpad R32 ready for whatever I feel like throwing at it (and that might br "selling it to the high bidder").

Looking over this blog for the past three years, Debian has saved my personal bacon more than once, as it has in the post-Fedora-13/14/Ubuntu 9.10+ graphics debacle of 2010. If you've never run Debian, you owe it to yourself (and to the rest of us) to drop it on a box or two and experience Linux in an albeit slightly different but profound way.