It really depend, when I was using pharo 4 back when it was the "unstable/alpha" version it was rock solid, same story with pharo 3. Pharo 5 is the first seriously problematic unstable pharo version.

The reason is that Pharo 5 has a ton of core changes , new vm, new debugger, new guis api , new compiler in short a ton of new things went in. Even I that I love to working on the cutting edge of Pharo , I am forced to go back to pharo 4. Shortcuts dont work, latest update broke the rendering of menus, pharo 5 is a mess BUT when it becomes stable it will be our biggest update by far dwarfing all previous updates combined.

Its even scarier if you take a look at the new stuff Pharo 6 will bring, I dont envy Esteban :D

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 11:08 AM David Allouche <david@allouche.net> wrote:

> On 16 Jan 2016, at 02:42, Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:
>
> So if occasionally if everything seems against you, after trying a
> fresh Image as you already did,�� slide back to the last build that
> worked for you (I don't think the issues you experience are Spur
> related, but 50496 might be a good fallback as Pre-Spur and
> Pre-GTDebugger).�� Then create a fresh Image from the latest build to
> test your Slice and in that time maybe the other issues have gone.

Ok. So my earlier question (in Slack, I think) about how "unstable" is unstable in Pharo is now answered. It's really unstable, not "Debian-like unstable".

It would also be nice to add some public info about that. I'll create an issue.

At the moment, I am stuck with GTDebugger, because it seems the old debugger does not have any keyboard shortcut form stepping through code. And that's something I would really really miss. So I'll suffer the pain of all the other glitches, and see how that goes.