Yeah, I’ve noticed there’s this subsection of people that have a completely wrong understanding of what the term “stable” means in the world of distros, and that it often creates as many problems as it solves, particularly on a desktop PC, or even worse, a gaming PC.
And for there record: Stable just means that things don’t change. That doesn’t mean it contains less bugs, is easier to use or is more secure. And on the flip side it doesn’t mean that distros that are not “stable” are necessarily “unstable” in any shape or form.
Stable distros are great as targets for development, such as for containers. It also works great for end user environments because developers aren’t trying to hit a moving target in terms of core libraries.
For a home user, having something more stable isn’t very beneficial. If you want to have things stay the same for the next 2 years or so, then go for it.
It’s one of the reasons why fedora works well, it has just a 6 month release cycle, so nothing gets too stale. More modern packaging formats like flatpak and appimage are changing things a bit since they don’t rely on the system packages and can use something newer.
Yeah, I’ve noticed there’s this subsection of people that have a completely wrong understanding of what the term “stable” means in the world of distros, and that it often creates as many problems as it solves, particularly on a desktop PC, or even worse, a gaming PC.
And for there record: Stable just means that things don’t change. That doesn’t mean it contains less bugs, is easier to use or is more secure. And on the flip side it doesn’t mean that distros that are not “stable” are necessarily “unstable” in any shape or form.
Stable distros are great as targets for development, such as for containers. It also works great for end user environments because developers aren’t trying to hit a moving target in terms of core libraries.
For a home user, having something more stable isn’t very beneficial. If you want to have things stay the same for the next 2 years or so, then go for it.
It’s one of the reasons why fedora works well, it has just a 6 month release cycle, so nothing gets too stale. More modern packaging formats like flatpak and appimage are changing things a bit since they don’t rely on the system packages and can use something newer.