Been on testing for years without problems. Super reasonable choice for a personal machine if you need recent software versions. Always use a separate partition for /home, have backups in place and your golden.

Current work machine. Running fine for 4.5 years.

  $ stat / | grep "Birth" | sed 's/Birth: //g' | cut -b 2-11
  2020-06-20



  $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources
  # Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
  Types: deb deb-src
  URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
  Suites: unstable
  Components: main non-free contrib
  Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

  # Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
  Types: deb
  URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
  Suites: testing
  Components: main non-free non-free-firmware contrib
  Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

You may also want `apt-listbugs` package to see the serious bugs before running upgrade.

I’m no AWK expert but I know just enough to tell when it’s the right tool for a particular job. Most pipelines consisting of `grep`, `sed` and `cut` commands can be replaced with a single AWK command. In this case:

    stat / | awk '/Birth:/ { print $2; }'

For the line containing the `Birth:` regex, print the second field (by default, fields are delimited by spaces). Other lines that don’t match the regex are ignored.

Wouldn't running uptime be quicker than your stat command pipeline?

stat command gets the detail of when the OS was installed on the machine. uptime doesn't give that. I wanted to say that I have been using the same development machine at work for 4.5 years. "running" was not the right word for it, obviously.

Makes sense, thanks.

You can also use apt-pinning to set priority for which release to use.

A long time ago I ran stable, and pinned testing at low priority.

Across the decades I've slowly upgraded my stance. Now my machines run Debian Unstable, with testing and experimental pinned at very low priorities. Unstable does sometimes have unsatisfiable dependencies, so it's good to have some other options. And sometimes I just want what's coming for a specific package or kernel, and experimental will often be there.

https://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html