Never heard about VSIDO ...

[Flynn]

Hello Community,

I never heard about VSIDO before, but everything I read here in the forum sounds great. Currently I'm still a #!-User and I'm really happy with this awesome Openbox-Tint2-Conky-Distribution. I also using #! in my business environment, because it's f***** fast, stable and have everything I need.

On the first look it seems that VSIDO is also fast and awesome. Also stable enough for the daily work with it? In a business environment? Debian Wheezy has become LTS, I'm not in panic, so I can use #! the next 3 years. But I am curious and it would simply interest me.

Cheers,
Flynn

[PackRat]

Welcome to VSIDO.

stable enough for the daily work with it? In a business environment?

Yes, for all intents and purposes, it should be stable for (most) daily work if you stick with an openbox - tint2 - conky setup since it's not particularly complex (think Gnome, KDE) so your upgrades should go smoothly. There are some extra precautions to take with Debian Sid which are detailed in some other threads on this forum or the #! forum.

One issue you might run into is that Debian Sid is categorized as unstable - depending on what you do for work and the QA/QC requirements of your projects, using unstable or beta software may not be allowed - either by company policy or contractually. You will want to check with your project manager or IT department on that.

[VastOne]

Hello Flynn and welcome to VSIDO and the forums. Good questions, and those that should be asked by anyone considering SID for anything

For those of us who chose SID years ago, we soon learned that the 'unstable' branding it gets is total bullshit.  In all my time using it prior to developing VSIDO, I had 1 major incident that caused pain (Perl Jam I).  It was resolved and dealt with in ways to prevent it from ever happening again

With VSIDO, there are several tools in place to stop users from having to deal with borkage and/or breakage.. listbugs, deporphan,  these forums and the IRC are there to prevent and educate. They work as long as users try to understand the messages you get from apt-get and apt-get dist-upgrade

Having said all that I will give you my own real world experiences with VSIDO and this environment.  I have two main servers I consider production and my business/production environment.  This one I am on is my build server and it has 5 partitions of the Jedi version, 4 partitions still of the VSIDO 3 version and 1 partition of the original version 1_2 ... they are primarily for testing builds, but the 1_2 is from the beginning and IS VSIDO up to date... in other words, I have used the same build system and done dist-upgrades to todays SID levels for 3 years on this and am still going

The second server is my test web development, backup and restore server (testing for the forum web), media server (music and video with Plex) and overall network server.  It has been down 2 times in the 3 years that VSIDO has been alive on it (another 1_2 server kept up to todays SID levels with dist-upgrades) ... one time it was down was due to a power failure and then a UPS failure as well.  The second time was due to a physical move of the machine

I dev VSIDO and I swear by it

I hope I have answered your critical questions

[Digit]

looking over at my big main workstation...  i realise, despite several explorations* off to other states of existence, when the shit hit the fan, it's back to the vsido install with it.  i have it doing some "mission critical" data recovery stuff at the moment.  this is the first vsido i installed iirc [edit: anyone care to remind me how long ago that was?  i remember it was a january, but what year was it?  when did vsido start?].     it has been through the wars.  i have given it quite the kicking.  any problems it has, came from me (~ not entirely true... some turbulence experienced with systemd's arrival).

i used stable n then testing branches for years.  n then i started pinning the occassional thing from sid when i needed the latest (or at least newer).  it got to a point where trying to pin what i needed was becoming more nuissance than the problems i was likely to incur by "just going sid".... and just going sid in my experience, as echoes VastOne's, was a refreshing surprise in the absense of the much trumped up pains sid was aleged to be riddled with.

and most of that was kinda just bald sid.  i'd been on sid for a couple years or whatever before vsido showed me there are all those other tools n safeguards n further extremes n whatnots to help manage n mitigate n explore the sidness.   ^_^ 

so, yeah, it's stable enough for sure, for >99% usecase i reckon.   
just play it safe if your office is anything like a nuclear facility, or something the provides everyone with water or electricity, or risks catastrophe if the system chokes ever.  nowhere too big to let fail.  everywhere else, you can have reasonable confidence.   but do try experience that for yourself.  dont just take our word for it.

ps,  arch bit me so many times, and not just small nibbles either.  sid never bit me unless i was mistreating it.  gentoo never bites, but seems to always want to be gumming at you.   exherbo demands to be locked in a mutual perpetual bite.  i've yet to have spent enough time with void to know if it will bite (though i presume it will).  ...  sid really is the friendliest roller.

* those explorations on that machine include: time spent with bedrock, which then had a sid client as the main glut of it, with my configs from vsido copied over (so that was still basically running sid... just it simultaneously had the packages available to run from my arch n slackware n gentoo clients too); time spent in windows for elite dangerous, which then necessitated a radical hardware upgrade, effectively a new computer (case n peripherals were all that stayed same), and the same vsido install has picked up running again on that fine enough. 

[VastOne]

^ Nice Savant... gratitudes!

[Snap]

ps,  arch bit me so many times, and not just small nibbles either.  sid never bit me unless i was mistreating it.  gentoo never bites, but seems to always want to be gumming at you.   exherbo demands to be locked in a mutual perpetual bite.  i've yet to have spent enough time with void to know if it will bite (though i presume it will).  ...  sid really is the friendliest roller.

Agreed. Sid is the friendliest roller I've ever faced. The drawback IMHO (nothing is perfect) is that Debian, Sid and/or apt require more time and dedication than other systems with other package managers. The difference is that those other systems take les time to upgrade... until they break. Then you need to manage to fix the issues, sometimes very time consuming and can even drive you crazy. Here you have to spend some more time into preventive medicine. so breakages doesn't happen if you care your system. In other words; for many other systems, keep it rolling untill it breaks. Then fix it. In Vsido, just give it some dedication when upgrading and it won't break.

[dizzie]

My turn to chip in 


Been using Debian since, crack of dawn, well close anyway Always been my #1 distro of choice, and still is. However, a very few issues keeps making me try/run other distroes, but even that. I always come back. In the past we had the infamous Perl-jam, but that got sorted, then we had the il-hated nvidia putting hate on Linux users. That also got sorted. Then Debian got smart (S-M-R-T) and though, hey let's do something stupid, like... 32bit on 64bit, has to use --arch=32bit or some shit (I can't remember, and now I don't care) And let's not talk about systemd! My point it, every time something stupid happen, we all find a way to say fuck you, and get it done. I will always love using Debian, and I have been using a lot of different (read: weird if you like).


I think, 1994/1995 or something, was the first time I installed Debian, and this day/year. Debian is the #2 oldest distro, which is still in use, and maintained. #1 is Slackware 


So yeah, Debian till I can't type, read, or breathe *throws the Debian gang-sign out* 

[Flynn]

Hello Folks,

thank you very, very much for your reviews & experiences. I think, I'll give VSIDO a try on a seperate partition. The last years I only used CrunchBang (since #! I stopped my distro-hopping) but I think soon it it's time to look for a new distro-home.

[VastOne]

Good to hear that Flynn.. Just remember that OpenBox is an apt-get away.. you can then copy your config from your #! setup and be running the same in no time

[Flynn]

VastOne, that's the way it is