LMDE update - rolling release

After months using it, this is my daily experience with LMDE.

- package breakage is there, so anyone using LMDE should aware of this and read the forum before you do any updating.
- only do update things that you need to update. If your softwares works fine, then you don't need to update it. unless if you need some new features just implemented by the software that you use.
- clean up your LMDE at least once every three months or after software updates. you can do this by first of all go to package manager and clean up the configuration files that you no longer use. then do the "sudo apt-get autoclean". after that find your orphaned files and delete the files you don't need. for details, you can go to this thread "http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=140920"
- you need to clean it up so that you don't need to update the things that you don't need
- update using the package manager rather than using the mint update, just as a precaution. because i don't know the extend of mint update advancement
- update some of them first. if you need to update libre office for example, then do that first, after that's done you can update the other softwares that you want to update. being conservative on the updates is better so that you can isolate your problem early. If you update everything one time, then you don't know which package that cause your LMDE running weird

conclusion: if you are a newbie then I suggest you use ubuntu or the latest linux mint. they are much nicer to use, and breakages are less to occur. But if you are quite adept with linux, brave enough to face some package breakage, and quite patient waiting for the cure, then this is the distro for you. I myself is using LMDE for everyday work, I rely my LMDE laptop for mission critical work, and it never let me down. Tinkering is definitely needed, so if you don't like to take time to thinker with it the as I already suggested, you can use ubuntu or linux mint latest edition.

some softwares that i encountered broken and fixed in a few weeks:
VLC
I'm gonna add later when I found another one

some stuff that I find a bit hard to upgrade (just because you need to select the right packages):
linux-image
libre office (from open office)

some problems that's hard to solve but eventually solved:
hibernate

things that make me a bit confused:
too many programs doing the same thing, i have to uninstall some of them to clean it up

As you can see, everything is solved, but you have to take your time to do that.  But nevertheless it's not BIG problems that cause down time for me to finish my work.

Keep on going LMDE. I hope it will get easier as time goes by.

BTW, I'm using the testing repository. For more conservative update you can use the other one (i forgot the name of it), check on the mint forum for that.

for everyday work i use microsoft office running on wine (multi files with sheets after sheets of calculations, linking with each other like crazy, libreoffice can't handle it yet, soon i hope). firefox and google chrome for emails and browsing. wifi as my primary connection to office network and internet. dropbox, to make sure i can open my files everywhere else. openproj to do my scheduling, xmind to help me thinking, aris express for workflow design. K3B to burn my discs, acrobat reader. varicad viewer or draftsight to view autocad drawings. pidgins and gnucash. other than that for my hobby i use darktable, picasa, kino (video editing), handbrake, atunes, songbird, and VLC.