Been running a machine on Debian sid for about ... 5 years and literally never had anything break. Same for the machines I've had Arch on for up to about 3 years. As for constant updates... update it less? I just update the Debian machine when I can be arsed. Which tends to be every 6 months or so.

sidux/aptosid does/did custom kernels based on the latest (unlike vanilla debian sid) so on account of that they had to also put patches onto a bunch of other stuff and sometimes (/frequently) their repos got out of sync. You can read all about it here if you are so inclined.

It did put me off the whole rolling release idea, and now I just clean install fedora, ubuntu and opensuse every year or two depending on when support runs out, the hdd dies, or I want to see some new thing. I generally run updates monthly, mainly for the security fixes (but not excluding others).

Ahh right, yeah that could get annoying.

I do rather like Fedora and OpenSUSE. The latter has a rolling option :>

Yeah I noticed that. Does seem to be buzzword du jour.

S'cos it's better :Y

Timed releases made sense when stuff was distributed on CDs but now people use t'net they make less sense.

I still burn live cds (usually minimal xfce or even headless server), so I can test on my hw prior to install & for rescue.

No USB stick?

My pc isn't usb-bootable. On the plus side, it has an AGP slot!

Have you tried upping the agp voltage?

If that doesn't work, reseating the RAM is sure to fix any issues.

I refuse to believe that could solve anything, and I'm a hardware man tbh.

My agp card runs great at stock voltage. I gave up on over clocking about 7 years ago.

If only you could work out how much energy you've saved by not overclocking. I warrant it'd be worth a few centimes or whatever crazy currency you use over there.

^_________^

It's more all the fiddle fucking around and lock ups I saved, tbh.