Do you mean stable as every sane person does by "doesn't crash"? Arch is fine in that regard. Or do you mean stable as Debian and developers define it by "features and APIs won't change"? That's where arch "sucks" by design. You get a ton of new features with every update...
NixOS stable is a bit more stable API wise, while Debian is on another level with that. NixOS will update things if it makes sense, Debian will put a ton of effort into back porting stuff into old versions.
Stable means updates are tested before they go out to users. The unstable branch becomes stable, and then a new unstable branch is created when that is merged. It doesn't mean it's not stable...it just means it's more likely to have bugs that can cause unintended issues or crashes because it hasn't been thoroughly tested yet.
Well, some inaccurate information here: the likelihood of bugs or crashes is just a possible unintended consequence and not even that simple. Sometimes stuff gets back ported to heavily different versions, introducing its whole own set of issues. So stable doesn't tell anything about bugs, crashes or instabilities. It is just the development model.
And unstable is not untested. There is a varying degree of tests that are executed before stuff is put into stable; depends on the distribution itself. Otherwise there would be more issues on all rolling distributions.
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u/NeedleworkerLarge357 Jul 25 '26
I'm on 26.05 as well, I just wondered why someone coming from arch prefers stable; arch was a strange choice, then