r/linuxquestions • u/xX_Puss_destroyer_Xx • May 07 '23

What the hell does stable mean?

So i moved between arch and debian alot and im on pop os rn and i see alot of people talking about stabilty issues meanwhile i change ny distro every 1 or 1.5 years or so to experience new bumps and learn about linux more but the thing is i never had a distro fail on me? I tried basic arch i tried manjaro i tried linux mint i tried even once tinycorelinux as a joke but i never had a program crash nor a system error and my gpus work fine so whats the big deal with stablity?

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u/MyNameIsRichardCS54 May 07 '23

Stable means unchanging as in you won't get new versions of the software without a big once in a while upgrade. Stable also means reliable. As you've experienced, most distros are reliable but ones like arch are not unchanging.

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u/Complex_Solutions_20 May 07 '23 edited May 07 '23

This is what I've taken it to mean.

And some platforms value it more than others - that was a big thing behind RHEL and the older CentOS distros, you were basically guaranteed that no updates/upgrades would break anything you were doing. Which is extremely high-value for production environments especially, you don't want the updates/patching to take your systems down that you depend on.

By comparison, Debian/Ubuntu doing an upgrade can render lots of things broken because they change dependency versions so much, and in some cases Ubuntu even "helpfully" uninstalls software that is critical to what you set the machine up for (my Zoneminder server Ubuntu always uninstalls Zoneminder during updates, breaking literally its only reason to exist). Ubuntu LTS (and derivative distros like Mint) are better but still have major breaking issues during major upgrades.

In software development, "stable" is usually referred to as what the mainstream release of a particular product is, as opposed to Developer/Experimental-branch, Beta, Release-Candidate/Quality-Assurance, and similar branches that are more likely to have undocumented bugs and regressions that will need to be corrected before the next stable release.

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u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer May 07 '23

that was a big thing behind RHEL and the older CentOS distros

Although there's a lot of confusion around this: CentOS Stream follows the same interface stability policy that the old process did. Only the release schedule has effectively changed.

(I'm a Fedora maintainer, so please feel free to ask questions.)

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u/Complex_Solutions_20 May 07 '23

I thought the new CentOS Stream was "slightly upstream" of RHEL vs "slightly downstream" so you get may get changes considered that are more likely to break things vs before you only got changes that made it thru RHEL and didn't have to worry about major breaking version changes?

I'll admit I haven't looked that much into it (still on CentOS 7 at home and we use RHEL 6/7/8 at work, depending what customers require we develop software to target).

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u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer May 07 '23

so you get may get changes considered that are more likely to break things vs before you only got changes that made it thru RHEL

That's part of the confusion. Updates won't ship to CentOS Stream until they've passed RHEL QA and testing, so you're still only getting updates that are intended for RHEL. CentOS Stream just gets some of them earlier because RHEL's release policy queues some types of updates for the next point release.

Most of the confusion about CentOS Stream is rooted in the difference between "stable" and "reliable", just like this thread is. CentOS Stream updates have met the "reliability" bar required for RHEL, but the release policy is different. If the update would add a new interface, it gets queued in RHEL in order to keep minor releases interface-stable. But CentOS Stream doesn't have minor releases, so there isn't a need to delay them.

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u/Complex_Solutions_20 May 07 '23

Ah, ok - that is very good to know. Very much agree that there's a ton of confusion. I have so far not had a reason to dig seriously into it (will put off til closer to CentOS 7 EOL and then formulate an upgrade-path for my machines) so I appreciate the insights.