People often mistake the word “stable” in different contexts and I wish to clear up the confusion.

There are two main meanings in the world of GNU/Linux for the word above and these two meanings are vastly different:

  • once booted the system does not crash, therefore it is stable
  • once installed the system behaves exactly the same for the lifetime of this install, therefore it is stable

In both examples above you can mix-in the word “reliable” in more than one way as well, but for me personally the word reliable means that I can rely on my computer to be ready to do my bidding when I am ready to use the system. If a daily update changes how my system functions, or worse if it no longer works then the system is not reliable because I can not rely on it.

But allow me to dissect the word stable as it is frequently used. Release stability (Debian) means that as long as you are using “this” install your system will remain predictable. It WILL get security updates, but they will not come via software version updates from upstream. Security updates will be backported to the current version of software and this is done by a special Debian security team. To put it plainly: Your version of Debian comes with your_software v1.3 and it has a security issue which has later been solved in your_software v1.4 so in a rolling-release distribution this is solved by replacing version 1.3 with version 1.4 no matter if this upgrade breaks any of the ten thousand dependencies from the Arch Linux repository. In Debian, on the other hand, this security update is backported manually to your_software v1.3 so your software is now fully patched against malicious attack while remaining the same version as originally shipped — which means that it will not break any of the seventy thousand possible dependencies in the Debian repository.

And it is not just about NOT breaking dependencies from the Debian repository. It also matters for your config files. Let’s say you have a web server for your company and your business generates money by having that webpage online. And you upgrade your rolling distribution and your config file is no longer compatible because upstream web server has changed the format and your website no longer works and you get fired and you are now homeless. Granted, this scenario is not realistic because you are a pro sysadmin and you will read documentation before performing a possibly breaking update and make proper config file changes and testing before deploying the upgrade, so there will be no downtime. But if you are such a good sysadmin this means that you will invest a portion of every day into planning Arch Linux updates, while with Debian you will literally invest zero time into this.

So from the example above you can understand how Debian brings a lot higher value in revenue (yes, money).

I have personally had a situation where Arch Linux has replaced SDL2 with SDL3 and Kdenlive no longer worked after that so I couldn’t make my video that day. I know what you are going to say: Why didn’t you install a Flatpak instead? Well, I actually did do that and this was a good workaround for the problem that was not solved in Arch Linux for the following couple of months… But flatpak usually comes from Flathub. And Flathub is, let’s be real, an entirely different distribution. Flathub is not Arch Linux, so why would you use an unreliable GNU/Linux distribution and mix it with Flathub distribution in order to make it more reliable? Why not use a reliable distribution in the first place?

If this video and post resonated with you, share it with someone who is distrohopping too much.