Siph

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Demiguy • Breton • VTuber • Marxist • Furry wolf

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Thinking once again about how in discussions about OSes, especially Linux, I find it frustrating that the term "(un)stability" conflates two notions that I think would lead to less confusion and more productive conversations if they were treated separately

"Stability" can mean either:

  • The system works reliably and with as little issues as possible over time

Or

  • The system does not change often to guarantee a more easily maintainable environment

Sometimes there's correlation between these two, but it's not a strict rule.

The more prominent example I can think of is that I don't think Arch Linux and Debian Unstable are "unstable" in the same way. Debian Unstable often breaks and has packages issues because it's usde as a platform to test new package releases to be selected for inclusion in Testing and then from there eventually in Stable. Arch Linux is "unstable" because it doesn't have releases and always has more recent versions of software packages available, but they're more thoroughly tested and so Arch usually keeps working pretty well especially if you put in the effort to stay on top of updates at least on a monthly basis.

I think that nuance is important because it can cause people to have false ideas about certain distributions.


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in reply to @Siph's post:

The thing with Arch is that you're often either using it on a secondary computer as a learning opportunity for how Linux works, or on your main rig as a hyper specific setup you couldn't find another distro for (notably when it comes to combining alternate filesystems, encryption, and a separate /home drive, as an example), it's pretty stable if you know what you're doing