Distributions quote of the week [LWN.net]

Over the years I have found so many people choosing stable OSes over cutting edge systems.

I often call Debian the eventual OS. Eventually, with age or exigency, most travelers come to rest under its unmoving shadow :)

— Tushar Chauhan

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Well, except no

Posted Jun 25, 2026 22:13 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

I find this quote strangely compelling but it does not really align with the evidence.

At just the surface level, if the second statement was true, Debian (perhaps the oldest distro with a package manager) would not have the same market share as Arch Linux and dramatically less than Ubuntu.

And if the trend was towards less "cutting edge" distros, Arch and Cachey would not be gaining as rapidly in popularity as they clearly are.

You can tell where somebody lands on the opinion spectrum by the way they use the word "stable". Many people actually find "cutting edge" distros more robust then fixed version distros for a variety of reasons. As used in this quote, "stable" means "not changing" and not necessarily higher quality.

Well, except no

Posted Jun 26, 2026 12:18 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> You can tell where somebody lands on the opinion spectrum by the way they use the word "stable".
> As used in this quote, "stable" means "not changing" and not necessarily higher quality.

Remember that "quality" is in the eye of the beholder rather than some universal spherical cow metric. In the above context, "unexpected changes" == "lower quality".

So yes, "stable" in the context of distros only ever means "unchanging except for what I personally care about". In other words, take an "LTS" distro and layer your $bespoke_production_software_stack on top of it.

What is cutting edge here?

Posted Jun 26, 2026 10:07 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

It depends on how you define cutting edge. Are there more people on stable distros than running release candidates and alpha/beta versions of every software? Probably.

But there are lots of people who choose the features in the latest proper upstream release over "stability" because "stability" gives you very little benefit on an individual system, especially if you eventually have to do the compatibility break anyway.

Where "stable" shines is when you have a large amount of identical systems managed by some kind of central system and you want to keep all of them more or less in sync with updates and control when breakage happens. Here Debian is quite good but "more stable" systems like RHEL and the others with extreme long term support times long past upstream support are again more of a pain and only really used in areas where slow bureaucracies and regulatory environments mandate them because they themselves can't keep up.

Not stable

Posted Jul 1, 2026 20:52 UTC (Wed) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (1 responses)

Not stable, just out of date. Refusing to fix bugs does not stability make, just vulnerability.

Not stable

Posted Jul 2, 2026 9:05 UTC (Thu) by surinameclubcard (guest, #139470) [Link]

CitationS needed. Capital S on purpose.