what i mean by production is "not randomly breaking because it's feature freeze time and now i have to reinstall everything". i assure you it's not a high bar

sorry if i sound a little annoying about this, it's just that i've seen so many people recommending debian testing as if it's just a different flavor of debian for people who want a more up-to-date system and are willing to deal with a little instability, but it is not that. debian testing is made exclusively for testing debian. it is not made for daily driving. i've had so many issues with debian systems in my lab which i later found out were caused by someone "upgrading" the system to testing bc they heard debian testing is the daily driving version and debian stable is just for servers that need 99.9% uptime

honestly, you'd be better off using sid rather than testing, since it's rolling release

as for gimp, they can just use pinning to upgrade gimp exclusively. they can also use backports. no need to upgrade the whole system