A few months prior to every Stable release, people start raving about how awesome running Testing is, how it has up-to-date packages and fixes their kernel issues and solves world hunger and capitalism.
This is because Testing has done a soft freeze, then a hard freeze, then is prepped to become the new Stable. During that process, nothing new can be added to Testing.
Then, one day, Stable is released and the floodgates on Testing re-open. The people who specified "Trixie" are fine: they are now running Stable. The people who specified "testing" in their apt sources, or are installing Testing based on the wonderful reports of just a month ago, are in for a terrible experience. And... anyone who installed Stable as "stable" instead of "bookworm" is now getting upgraded shortly after release day, instead of at their convenience.
This happens every cycle.
Never recommend that anyone new to Debian should install Testing, even if it's about to become Stable. Unless you are working on throwaway systems, always specify a codename for release, not "stable" or "testing" or "unstable".
I'm on stable like 3/4 of the time, until there's some newer package version I want and that happens to be in testing, at which point I switch (using the codename as you suggest instead of Testing). If I don't have a specific need, I tend to switch during the soft or hard freeze, out of curiosity, because I never had problems doing that.
This is because Testing has done a soft freeze, then a hard freeze, then is prepped to become the new Stable. During that process, nothing new can be added to Testing.
Then, one day, Stable is released and the floodgates on Testing re-open. The people who specified "Trixie" are fine: they are now running Stable. The people who specified "testing" in their apt sources, or are installing Testing based on the wonderful reports of just a month ago, are in for a terrible experience. And... anyone who installed Stable as "stable" instead of "bookworm" is now getting upgraded shortly after release day, instead of at their convenience.
This happens every cycle.
Never recommend that anyone new to Debian should install Testing, even if it's about to become Stable. Unless you are working on throwaway systems, always specify a codename for release, not "stable" or "testing" or "unstable".