Etch have
been frozen for about a month now and will soon become the new
stable Debian. I used to run Sarge (the current stable) on my
desktop while it was still in testing and since I liked the
experience I decided to give Etch a try during the winter break.
Among the major improvement there is now a graphical installer and
AMD64 became an official architecture. Aside from that all the
packages are upgraded to bleeding edge versions and there are quite
a few new comers. A full binary download is now 21 CDs, double
that if you want the sources. All of those packages have now passed
the freeze so we can expect Etch to be the most complete
distribution ever released thought Gentoo must not be too far.
The install went smoothly. The console install is pretty much
the same with the "normal" mode asking even less questions than
before. No doubt, anyone can install this distribution. The
graphical install is cute but the transitions are sometimes strange
and the "next" button don't alway do what one would expect.
Hopefully this will be fixed before the release. I had no problem
to setup a software RAID over SATA at install time with / and /boot
on LVM on top of the RAID. I heard people have had problems with
that setup with other distros, so far didn't notice any glitches. Of
course I didn't burn the 21 CDs, the usual way to install Debian is
to burn only the "netinst" CD and to use the excellent apt tool to
install the packages from the network when you need them. Apt
performs all dependency calculations and compared to yum and urpmi,
it is blindingly fast (diclaimer: the last time I used urpmi was a few
years ago, it might be better now).
Some packages still present a few minor bugs but the overall
experience so far is great. The new KDE 3.5.5 now feature
text-to-speech integration. KDE must have been tuned lately because
it feels really snappy and responsive, even over XDMCP. I was able
to keep /home unchanged and everything just worked. It's good to
know that systems with many more users are likely to upgrade
smoothly because no one likes to nuke his .kde when he arrives on
Monday morning. By the way, rm -rf .* is never a good
idea (someone knows what I'm talking about).
For a system that isn't mission critical, I think that Etch is
ready now and I encourage everyone to try it. Debian Etch is a
flexible meta distribution that can be shaped into either a desktop
or a server with loss of usability or stability.
