Debian 8 : My failed first attempt

After hearing from a number of places how excellent Debian 8 was, I finally decided to get round to giving it a try. I quickly found the reference to the live system iso on the Get Debian page and downloaded the 64bit xfce image.

I created a new Virtual Machine and started the live session and was met with a pretty standard xfce desktop.

Debian 8 Live XFCE session

Now, XFCE might not be the prettiest desktop environment, but it's quick and functional. The first thing that jumped out at me though was the installer icon on the desktop labeled as Install Debian sid.

I was a bit confused given that this was meant to be Debian 8, also known as jessie, and sid is the unstable version. (I was beginning to feel a bit like this was something from Toy Story, and half expected references to woody or buzz lightyear.)

Ignoring that I went for it. The installer was pretty much similar to most others and soon enough it was installed, and grub was installed and I was ready to reboot. So I did. Only to be met with a console screen complaining it was giving up waiting for something and couldn't find a volume group.

Ugh.

I went back to the Debian site and downloaded the cinnamon live system iso just in case it was something to do with the xfce one. I started that up, started installing "sid" and went to make a coffee. Upon my return, I was greeted by a lock screen which then prompted for the live session password.

Since I didn't know the live session password, and various attempts at Toy Story character names and other generic options yielded no results I terminated the virtual machine and gave up.

Now, I can almost here some people out there muttering about how it serves me right for using a live session and I should have just installed it from the normal install DVD edition.
Yes, perhaps that's true. The fact is though, the live session version is there in plain view on the Debian site and may (or may not) be attempted by some. Perhaps they will succeed with the live sessions where I did not. Perhaps it had something to do with the virtual machine.

I don't know. I will try installing from the normal DVD next and see how that turns out.

I am curious however. Debian prides itself on being stable, to the point that only security patches are applied to the stable release. As someone coming from more "bleeding-edge" side of things... how do you find sticking with outdated software packages and libraries for a long period of time?