Well, except no [LWN.net]

Well, except no

Posted Jun 25, 2026 22:13 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Distributions quote of the week

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.

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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.