Neither testing nor sid is intended for daily use.
And if you think of testing as a safer alt to sid think again.

Quoting: JSVRamirezMy plan was to use Debian testing; will it be necessary to roll with Sid from now on? This is the main way we watch TV/play games and the family won't be happy if it breaks. Again, I haven't used Sid for years, so this might not be a worry I need to have?

You can pin certain packages to Unstable or Experimental. Unstable does sometimes have unmet dependencies, or a package fails to install, but it never left me with a broken system. But testing should be perfectly fine.

When I bought my card, the support for it was still work-in-progress, so I had to get the kernel and Mesa packages from Experimental to get it all working. It's not a problem for me nowadays, but they still are improving things almost every day, so I like to get my fingers on them as soon as possible.

Testing is fine for daily use.

Quoting: mosNeither testing nor sid is intended for daily use.
And if you think of testing as a safer alt to sid think again.

Yes, it is. Testing/Unstable is a rolling distribution just like Arch Linux, and that is how I have been using my desktops for years. Stable is for servers.

Last edited by Linas on 14 December 2020 at 11:09 am UTC

Sid is fine too. I much prefer it to testing, things might break, but are fixed quickly. I've been on sid for the last 15 years or so.

All the little fixes takes much too long to trickle down to testing for my taste.

Ok lol. Its not however and never been intended to be used as such

Quoting: mosNeither testing nor sid is intended for daily use.
And if you think of testing as a safer alt to sid think again.

I used testing for many years without issue; I did jump to Sid for a short while, but went back very quickly! In my experience, it is great for daily use!

Quoting: LinasYou can pin certain packages to Unstable or Experimental. Unstable does sometimes have unmet dependencies, or a package fails to install, but it never left me with a broken system. But testing should be perfectly fine.

When I bought my card, the support for it was still work-in-progress, so I had to get the kernel and Mesa packages from Experimental to get it all working. It's not a problem for me nowadays, but they still are improving things almost every day, so I like to get my fingers on them as soon as possible.

I don't have a massive budget, so the card I'm looking at is over 12 months old, and almost certainly supported in mesa, so I should be fine

I just did a switch from GTX1060 to my brand new&shiny RX 5600XT a week ago.
This is on a system I built around 2 years ago: Ryzen 7 2700X, 16GB RAM, GTX1060.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 and have proprietary nV drivers installed, for gaming of course :)

I was also curious what happens, when I just turn off the machine, extract GTX1060, put there RX 5600XT and power it on.

Lo and behold, everything worked as seamlessly as possible. Ubuntu never touched those (still installed!) nV drivers and automatically fired-up Mesa. I was able to game via Steam immediately and in a plug&play fashion ;)

After this, I just added Oibaf PPA mesa devel driver repo to my system and updated drivers for best performance and for Cyberpunk2077 compatibility.
(Warning: this is a bleeding edge devel version of Mesa, so might be broken for gaming from time to time. 99.9% of the updates are working perfectly throughout the time though; I'm using it on my daily driver HP ENVY AMD-based laptop for 1,5 years).

I also wanted to test installation and usage of OpenCL, because I heard (some years ago) that on AMD oss drivers it is a pain to make it work. I had it installed and up&running within 5 minutes; tested it on rendering a scene via GPU in Blender....

Which reminds me - I should clean up the nV drivers from my system finally...

Marry Christmas! :)

Last edited by Boldos on 25 December 2020 at 9:03 pm UTC

Quoting: BoldosAfter this, I just added Oibaf PPA mesa devel driver repo to my system and updated drivers for best performance and for Cyberpunk2077 compatibility.
(Warning: this is a bleeding edge devel version of Mesa, so might be broken for gaming from time to time. 99.9% of the updates are working perfectly throughout the time though; I'm using it on my daily driver HP ENVY AMD-based laptop for 1,5 years).

If you don't want to give up on that last 0.1% of stability and still want the interesting fixes backported to stable Mesa releases, there's always Kisak's PPA as an alternative.

Quoting: BoldosI just did a switch from GTX1060 to my band new&shiny RX 5600XT a week ago.
<snip>

I was also curious what happens, when I just turn off the machine, extract GTX1060, put there RX 5600XT and power it on.

Lo and behold, everything worked as seamlessly as possible. Ubuntu never touched those (still installed!) nV drivers and automatically fired-up Mesa. I was able to game via Steam immediately and in a plug&play fashion ;)
<snip>
Marry Christmas! :)

Good news indeed (and Merry Christmas, too!) as I'm planning to go with an RX 5600XT, too. I'll be interested to hear what happens when you remove the nV files, as my Steam needed the nV driver installed (i386 libs) in order to even launch.