There has been a lot of bickering within the project between developers and there has been much poor communication with users, and even some people bounced out of IRC chats and message posts to the forums deleted or modified.

All of that may have taken place during the recent skirmishes; I certainly hope that it has all passed. Despite it all, sidux is a great distribution. I am just hoping that they are ready to move on now, but I have been pretty concerned about that. Hopefully those concerns will melt away, people will recover from the conflicts, those who had differences that they could not resolve will simply find new projects, and the overall outcome will be positive. That may happen, and I hope it does, but for a while it looked like things could come completely unglued; hope that ends up NOT being the case.
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sidux isn't going anywhere......just rumors that a few complaining users that are never happy are hoping for, but it is not going to happen. sidux is here to stay and will only get better, it is still a very new distro.

smxi or dist-upgrade, doesn't matter, sidux is solid as a rock !
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sidux is just changing direction, that's why they redid their logo and graphics for this release, the change to the scorpion is a good one, since sid can and does bite you at any time, sometimes fatally, and so can the team... I'd like to believe there was some irony in that decision but sadly humor seems to be singularly lacking in the project now, but still it's a nice thought...

In general, I really want to not give sidux much further thought, it's not a good way to spend time in my opinion. It will always be primarily what the devs want it to be, so whatever that turns out to be is how it will be.

For future however, my goal is to have no further interactions with that project, and to let smxi and sidux each wander off on their own.

However saying that a distro based on Debian Unstable is 'solid as a rock' is pretty much unclear on the concept, sidux will be roughly as solid as unstable is, and as we've seen with the recent 64 bit ia32libs issues, that can be quite unstable indeed. And expecting end users to actually track via forums breaks and warnings limits the actual user base to a small fraction of what it was before, that's just how it is, most people with lives don't have any interest in tracking such breaks, that's what smxi was for, and it works quite well.

And how much of sid's instability smxi covers will largely depend on the people who contribute to supporting the smxi sid backend warning system. If they keep up with breaks, it will do well, if they don't, it won't.

Personally I have no plans to run sid for most installs any longer, although I might continue to experiment with hybrid sid/testing installs, pinned to testing, but those have their own issues.

Unfortunately, in case after case, what I'm seeing out here in the real world is that group after group is going to ubuntu for their desktop solutions, for reasons that are becoming increasingly obvious to me, though it's not a choice I would make myself, not yet anyway. The sidux/smxi combination was in a sense an attempt to create a solid realistic, and reasonably user friendly (within the limits of running sid itself of course) rolling release desktop with a fairly simple and fast install and upgrade process. That experiment I personally consider to have been worth making, but I also consider it to have failed in any larger sense, leaving sidux as a more experienced user oriented distro, which their increasing demands to do system maintenance manually simply highlights as a fact. That is, by the way, a realistic change, despite how poorly they engaged in that change of direction, and how completely unpleasant the tone emanating from the core dev group became over the previous year or two, but that tone itself is going to also generate the type of user base I guess they want, which is what it is, it's certainly nowhere I want to go as a way to spend my time.
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Honestly, I'm having problems on my toshiba laptop now. It's probably more a "sid" instead of a "sidux" thing but I may just have to stay with something that "just works". I still am gonna wait a bit and see what happens but if the upgrades keep making me work to make things work, I'm just out on that.

Maybe I am spoiled by the fact that for well over a year now (for the most part) things pretty much did "just work" Sure there were the cups issues that seemed to plague a few, and different "little things" here and there but now it just seems like one thing after another. AGAIN, I'm not sure it's "sidux" at all. Perhaps just time for me to leave the cutting edge of things.
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sid has apparently gotten more unstable than it was. This is expected, since debian is largely volunteer run, and the real world is suffering what is looking more and more like the biggest economic collapse since the great depression.

This will obviously directly impact how much time/energy devs put in to try to avoid breaks in sid.

Keep in mind, sid is unstable, devs are allowed to put broken buggy packages in it, and just because they haven't always done that doesn't mean that they won't do it when pressed for time and money. And I feel personally somewhat foolish for criticizing the gnome maintainers for taking full advantage of the unstable nature of sid to upload their packages. I now realize that this simply makes their lives easier, they can then fix the bugs as reported, although gnome in sid becomes less usable for average people because it breaks so much, but that is NOT a flaw, it's sid at work, doing what it's designed to do, being a debugging pool for bugs and package conflicts.

I find the difference between debugging and delivering almost bug free stuff and just putting it out there fast is maybe 10 to 1 realistically, that's what I see in smxi/sgfxi stuff, and I'm sure that's the difference between uploading a barely working package and a heavily tested and debugged package. And debian says explicitly that sid can break, packages can have horrible bugs, etc. So being realistic about sid isn't a bad idea in these increasingly tough economic times. Sometimes a macro view is helpful to understand micro situations like sid growing more buggy.

Asking for a stable sid is like asking for solid quicksand, sure it's nice if you can get it, but it's not in its character or essence... and debian developers are under no obligation to make sid stable for us, that's what testing and lenny are for. Just because the quicksand firmed up during the dry season doesn't mean you should expect it to stay that way during the rainy times....
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The best I've ever seen it put. I think it's perhaps time for me to act my age LOL. I guess older and predictable isn't such a bad thing.
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Well, I hope Sid doesn't get too unstable to play around in. I've actually been able to use Sid based systems, sidux in particular, as my every day systems, but I have Debian Lenny handy, and I also have SimplyMEPIS, antiX, and a number of other distributions handy, in the event that Sid stops working well enough for me to use it as an every day system.

The good news, from my perspective, is that I generally operate with a nightly build of Seamonkey as my Internet Suite, using it for both Web Browsing and Email client use, but again, I have a stable version of Seamonkey on hand as well. I do the same thing with Firefox - having multiple versions, including nightlies, next releases, and current releases available to me, plus I test other browsers as well, such as Arora, Midori, and Opera.

I do not have all of my eggs in one basket. All it would take for me is to take my entire browser hidden directory and move it to another more stable system to keep from being shut out in the event of stability issues too large to deal with, but since 90%+ of my work involves browsers, email, and terminal use, that risk is not very high for me.

During all of the KDE hysteria, I could get KDE to work well enough for me to get the job done, for example, but I also hedge there, with XFCE, LXDE, IceWM, Openbox, JWM, fvwm, fvwm-crystal, and Enlightenment. Unless I am way off base, I am covered. Heck, I even have a copy of that proprietary OS that I'd rather not use very often, but it's there, and I have Virtualbox there, plus I have Virtualbox on two Linux systems.

Think I've got it covered? ;-)
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I run eight different Linux distros on 3 pc's, sidux is more "rock solid" than the other 7 distros, this though is my own personal experience and does no way reflect that I think everyone has the same results or opinions.

I also personally do not believe sidux or Debian is going to self destruct.

smxi is good, it has been a great tool for so many users including myself, I am sadden by the recent events and sorry that many good people have been offended and discouraged.
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I have been running a sid base for quite some time now. Previous to smxi there were a few breaks that cause me to backtrack a package but nothing fatal. Since I've been using smxi though these problems have been transparent.

I want to get my hands on another box of reasonable power and run it exactly as I do now but without smxi. I figure if I run parallel l will be able to see what I'm not seeing now and hopefully catch a few issues, maybe even help further smxi with reports and testing.

If you think this will help you I can search more aggressively. Right now I only have a desktop which I can't really mess with and an old cerleon 400 box which is hardly worth subjecting to sid.

My laptop sure runs sweet with antiX/sid/smxi though.
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I can say pretty much the same - I have a ton of software, numerous distros, yet I still enjoy sidux more than any of them. Get this: I grabbed Virtualbox OSE, put it on Windows Vista, installed a sidux instance there, and promptly forgot that I was even on Windows for quite a while. sidux is one of the few distros that nicely uses all of the screen real estate in virtual full screen mode, and seriously, with half of the machine allocated to it, sidux ran better in VIRTUAL mode than Vista did in real mode, but I guess that wouldn't surprise too many of you, would it? :-)
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