On the Heels of Wheezy, Aptosid Releases 2013-01 79
An anonymous reader writes "Right on the heels of Debian's 7.0 ('Wheezy') release, the Aptosid team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the 2013-01 release. Aptosid is a rolling release built on top of Debian's most modern branch Sid, providing the most up-to-date kernel available with patches and stabilization not yet seen in mainline, along with many patched Debian packages, all while maintaining 100% compatibility with upstream Debian (unlike other distros based on Debian). If you think Debian Stable is too old to be useful, give Atposid a spin!"
Re:Neat, a new updated Aptosid! (Score:4, Informative)
It has a script to update (Deliberately made to be as unreadable as possible.)
This is not true of aptosid. The update procedure is simply to stop X, run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and make sure what it wants to do seems sane before accepting it.
They don't use aptitude though or support it.
This is absolutely true and for similar reasons to why Debian has recommended using apt-get to perform the dist-upgrades between their stable releases. With sid you want to dist-upgrade and the predictable and consistent nature of apt-get is far better suited for this then aptitude which can often be too smart for it's own good.
Re:Neat, a new updated Aptosid! (Score:5, Informative)
The summary includes one of the major differences, the kernel. Wheezy (and sid as of now) has 3.2, this aptosid release has 3.9. The aptosid kernel stays very close to vanilla mainline with the latest stable/important/security patches and suitably tuned for most desktop users.
Another major difference is the installer (and it's live system) which brings a coherent set of packages to start with and some initial configuration which helps make it more suitable for use as a sid system such as disabling the installation of recommended packages by default. The initial aptosid system is a clean sid system, such as you can get from debootstrapping, without the pain of bootstrapping or the baggage accumulated by starting from a stable system and upgrading it to sid.
As a result of not being tied to the Debian kernel and debian-installer it can also often adopt features ahead of Debian itself without breaking compatibility with sid. Examples have included ath5k support for a fully Free wifi experience, insserv support for parrallel starting of initscripts and support for installing on EFI systems. Of course it doesn't support everything d-i does nor all the architectures of the Debian kernel.
The aptosid manual is great and covers an awful lot of material from setting things up to maintaining your system, guiding you to keep a supportable system in the unstable environment. It's available in 14 languages at the moment.
The artwork of course is also aptosid's own, changing with each release. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and of course you can pick other art from the Debian packages or your own images for wallpapers ... though I never bother.
Finally there is a community which wants to support those running sid and a "fix.main" section of the aptosid repo which often includes some "hot-fixes" for issues which have cropped up in sid, helping to protect it's users, sometimes briefly just waiting for the next debian mirror push and sometimes for issues which end up staying in sid for a long time.