My mid-90's boss often repeated his old bosses' sayin "No oh," as in never depend on an initial release, wait for the patches.

I follow this rule, or the variant where you wait for the first point release of a new major version, wherever possible. My desktop ran Debian bullseye until maybe about a month ago, when I updated to bookworm on its 5th point release. My browser of choice on that machine is firefox-esr, which is still on the 115.x branch.

I'm updating to bookworm on my daily driver laptop today - testing the full system backup now.

I've had minimal issues recently with debian but decades of debacles (not just debian, everything from RSX-11 to windows server) have made me cautious. So exhausted with wasted time.

I've really come to enjoy Debian stable. It's going to take something significant to get me off Bookworm.

> It's going to take something significant to get me off Bookworm.

Do you have experience using "Debian LTS"? It might have gotten me to stick to Bullseye for a little while longer, but I don't know much about it, and EOL was coming along soon.

I have a system running Debian LTS for ~2 years, with Firefox ESR. No complaints, no nightmares. So far it's just working!

> it makes sense to stay one major version behind - as long as it is a version to which security patches are applied regularly

That's why companies offer LTS SKUs.

GitLab only supports the latest three point releases, so that's not an option here.