Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
Hi, It's well-known that Debian releases are rock-solid. But I've been wondering if there's been a comparison between various releases as regards stability. It would be nice if there's some commentary from long-time Debian users (say those who experienced it pre-Woody), and another way is by judging by the number security fixes to a particular release. Any stats out there?
By definition and well supported by experience, debian stable is the most stable debian.
It's useless to compare current stable, debian sarge, to any debian stable in past or future.
By the way is there a distro out there considered as stable as Debian's Stable. This is not a question of which is a better distro (too many variables involved there), but just a question of, "which distro breaks less?"
I used to use suse and found that it breaks much more than debian. That's why I moved all my workstations and servers to debian.
In general, this is a difficult question to answer generally. If one is familiar with the details of an OS it's usually more 'stable' for that person to stick with it than switching to a new system. In the long run it might pay off to switch to a more stable, but less familiar distro.
Despite the fact that debian has more software packaged than other distributions, its security and stability are legendary. If you don't require all that packages (and don't bother to remove the packages not necessary for your tasks) other distributions with less packages available, but taylored to your taste may appear more stable.
That's just my personal, maybe biased view. YMMV. Johannes