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Euber Alexandre Barbosa
Euber Alexandre Barbosa

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Debian: Easily upgrading to the SID distribution

Developers usually stick with the latest version of the shiniest software out there, be it editors, browsers, stream players and office tools.

Some Linux Distributions are famous for its rolling-release model with all bleeding-edge/night packages in the main repo, that goes for Arch, Manjaro, Nix.

Not as famous as those there is a distribution of Debian named by SID, with all unstable packages, meaning packages not as tested as those in the Stable branch.

Do not be confused by its name, it has an as solid experience as Arch, but with the advantage of having all .deb packages that most companies and OSS developers always target.

Upgrading from Stable, or Testing, is about changing one word, its nickname if you will - bullseye, in the /etc/apt/source.list file, from this:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main

to:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid main

From there on, prepare yourself for one big upgrade of all packages installed with:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

There is only one catch on the SID distribution, as Debian changes from one big version to a new one, usually 2 years, there will be a whole month that most packages are frozen, and you may not receive any update.

Usually I just go distro-hopping for the shiniest and newest Distros, and after that, I go back to my beloved Debian in its newest version.

Nonetheless, do not frail from moving up to SID, it’s a rather worth effort.

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