from Squeeze to Unstable, and back again

2011-04-26

With all the noise regarding GNOME 3, I decided to lose patience and go check it out. Thing is it's currently in Debian Experimental suite, so I installed the essential components from there, stuff like gnome-shell, mutter and gnome-panel, and things weren't so smooth. So I thought that it might be because I was still using Squeeze (Debian 6, released in February), so I upgraded my entire system to Sid (the main Debian development suite). Well, the new hotness wasn't as usable as I'd like, so I decided to go back to my rock-solid and familiar GNOME 2 environment. I was surpride that I could to downgrade the whole thing back to Squeeze, without any major hitch. Of course the downgrading process wasn't exactly smooth (lots of package removals before re-installation for one), but I'm running Squeeze as we speak.

It would have been quicker for me to just re-install of course, especially because I have some installation and setup scripts to make it quick. But doing that would imply I wouln't have access to my computer for minutes on end. Not good. Also, it's nice that I continued running that fine-looking GNOME 3, while under-the-hood it was being removed. It took just a logout and back in to be back home... GNOME 2 from Squeeze. Note that this sort of thing is not officially supported by Debian. It's probably going to be harder to do this as Unstable develops further. But this exercise gave me newfound respect for the strength and stability of the Debian system.