How to go from Debian Stable to Debian Testing the easy way

Debian is a very old Gnu / Linux distribution, one of the first distributions out there and that sometimes makes its nomenclature old for some users. This is what happens for example with the stable and testing versions of Debian. Versions that at first differed a lot but now, in both versions, stability rules and a common user can use both the stable version and the testing version without having problems in a production team.

The great thing about Debian Testing is that there is usually more up-to-date software which tends to have new features that older software doesn't have, that's a plus point that many Debian users look for and therefore try to move on to Debian Testing, but how to do it?For a long time, switching from one version to another was done by deleting Debian and installing the Debian Testing image, but for years there has been a faster and easier way: update your repositories. If the repositories are updated, the Debian system will update automatically and will go to Debian Testing without any problem. We can also do the same in reverse, but we must be careful because the continuous change between versions can cause the distribution to break.

Debian Testing will offer us more up-to-date software

In order to edit the repositories, we open a terminal and write the following:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

After this, Nano will open with our repositories file. In it we will see several lines that mention Debian and stable. Well, we have to change the word "stable" to "testing". We will also find words like Jessie or Wheezy, in that case, we can also change the names to "testing" and save the changes made. Once we have saved, in the terminal we write the following:

sudo aptitute update && upgrade

Y Debian will start updating with the new software, and even our version of Debian will appear as Debian Testing. Although it seems somewhat difficult, the system is simple and once you have done it a couple of times, it will surely seem like a simpler task.