This is a brief overview of my experience installing debian buster- testing today and comparing it to my experience installing siduction a few months ago.
First and foremost:
Siduction has a GREAT installer in the form of a live CD which is pretty easy to use and doesn't fuck up. Not only is the Live CD useful for repairing broken installs, but the installer is dependable.
Today, I installed Debian Buster (testing) on my third hard drive (thinking that I'd therefore always have something that works, but reasonably up to date) and the installer is HORRIBLE!
The Debian graphical installer has an issue with the back button. If you click it, there's a 90% chance of breaking the install subtly. My first attempt at installing Debian Buster-Testing resulted in my root password being set to some crazy crap, and despite my best efforts using Siduction to try to change the root password of the debian install, alas, I could not reset the root password, thereby locking me out of the root account, and so the install was unusable. Had to reinstall.
No such problems with Siduction!
Secondly: Gnome
I hate gnome with a fiery passion like i've never felt before, I cannot imagine how anyone could use such a horrible desktop environment. Not only is it laggy and resource intensive, it lacks a task bar and it doesn't even have alt+mouse controls.
LXDE, which is the DE that I picked for my siduction install, is of course far superior. I did manage to get it on debian but Gnome is what Debian boots into.
The file manager Gnome uses is also quite bad, and doesn't have sort by type and list mode enabled by default. It's also clunky and I feel like my testicles are being strangled when I try to find a file.
Setting your desktop background and lock screen in the settings is also awful, as you can only search your pictures directory and only the top level. It took effort for them to fuck that up too, since they had to make a custom image file picker for that little applet.
Gnome is so terrible, that it took me 5 minutes to find the button to log out
Thirdly: Missing programs
Vim is missing, the "reboot" script is missing, dpkg-reconfigure is missing, There are so many programs most people would consider essential that are completely absent from Debian buster testing
Fourth: Improper configuration
Due to poor configuration, if you try to install a package with dpkg -i on debian buster, it won't work. Why? Because the PATH variable is not configured correctly. Every time I want to use dpkg, I have to run a script which sets the PATH variable correctly.
Fifth: Debian's theme is ugly
The desktop background in GNOME, LXDE and WindowMaker by default is really awful, a sort of pale-blue that reminds me of Microsoft Silverlight and bad adobe flash games.
The login screen is also ugly, and I'm still working on changing it. I'll see if my latest attempt is successful after I reboot. It's just a blank grey screen with a debian 10 logo on the bottom (I did manage to change the logo to an amiga ball)
On siduction, the default login theme looks great, I really like it. Siduction wins again.