openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's not stable as in unchanging but it is stable as in reliable.
+1 for Tumbleweed, it works so incredibly well. In the very rare case where an update doesn't work out for you, you can easily roll back to a previous btrfs snapshot.
Fedora is quite nice, too, but I've come to prefer rolling distros over a release based one.
Kalpa / Aeon might be interesting, too, if your use case fits an immutable distro.
Having tried many over the years, there is truly nothing as good as Tumbleweed.
This or Fedora which per release cycle aims for binary compatibility but happily updates packages if compatibility stays fine.
After many years on Ubuntu I switched to a Tumbleweed and couldn't be happier. Apparently a rolling distro can be more reliable than a traditional point-release one.
What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it's stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.
I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.
This here! I actually have had really good luck using Arch. I've been running it for only a month now and I make certain to patch/update once a week. Thus far it has not left me stranded. I think Arch is underrated as an OS.
I think Arch is underrated as an OS.
I don't think Arch is anywhere near "underrated". The "I use Arch, btw" meme didn't come out of nowhere. A lot of distros are based on Arch too. Even SteamOS (so the Steam Deck is essentially powered by Arch).
In that regard: yes, Arch is awesome. I use it, btw.
I feel like something like Fedora fits the bill: great, reliable, well-maintained repositories, decently updated kernels, yet never faced any major issues, and access to quite updated packages. Only issue is Red Hat caused a stir recently, though I still believe Red Hat does more good than bad in the open source community.
Red Hat is a corporation, putting dollars first. Not to mention Fedora is now starting to 'trample on user's privacy with telemetry integration.'
Some are making the case that Fedora's new telemetry integration isn't like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is 'anonymised.' Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don't trust Red Hat..and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.
Some are making the case that Fedora’s new telemetry integration isn’t like the bad telemetry like Google and others, it is ‘anonymised.’ Every corporation says this before they remove the username from the data collected and keep the unique user id. I don’t trust Red Hat…and now with this latest reveal, Fedora either. And privacy is all about trust.
Please stop with the FUD about the Fedora telemetry. It is opt-in and is no different than popularity-contest on Debian.
While I admit that the timing with Red Hat's closed-sourcing is really bad, and I'm also going to start avoiding Fedora for the same reason, saying that opt-in telemetry (that one can literally read the source code of) is "putting dollars first" is really dumb. Do you think the same about Debian's popularity-contest, which has existed since 2004?
I disagree that as the as the article states telemetry "contradicts open-source values", nowhere is it said in the official definition that telemetry by itself is not ok and as long as it is opt-in and the handler makes clear reports on the data they gathered, I'd say it's a good opportunity to give valuable insight to the developers on the use of their software, done in this manner it doesn't trample over anyone's choices either.
Notable examples of open source projects that implement telemetry are KDE and Mozilla, it's not unheard of at all
OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great choice for a rolling-release distro that is also really stable too.
I second OpenSuse Tumbleweed, only switched back to it after 7+ years and it's been great so far, no packages broke after update so far.
NixOS would fit the bill if you're not afraid of something different. With Nix it's trivial to cherry pick from unstable channel if you still want a stable base.
The holy grail, stable and up-to-date, it exists, it's called Debian with Flatpaks.
Install Debian. Avoid doing any changes to your package selection, try to get things from flatpaks.
This is my preferred way off doing things, but trying to glue VSCode + Android Studio + the Flutter SDK + Docker + ... together via Flatpack was an exercise in pain and sadness last time I tried it.
Getting all my normal boring desktop apps via Flatpack is awesome, but for a developer it just doesn't seem practical right now
Debian testing (more up to date than ubuntu, rolling release, much more stable than the name suggests, truly free as in freedom)
Fedora. Switched after years of Ubuntu and never looked back.
This really depends on your definition of "stability".
The technical definition is "software packages don't change very often". This is what makes Debian a "stable" distro, and Arch an "unstable" one.
The more colloquial definition of "stability" is "doesn't break very often", which is what people usually mean when they ask for "stable" distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it's going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.
I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it's only ever broken because I've done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn't broken since. However, I've also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you'll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.
Just like the holy grail, a stable and up-to-date distro doesn't exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that's actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn't hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn't mean that you won't. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.
With all of that out of the way I hope it's clearer why there's a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.
You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won't and you'll be happy with that. Many people are.
As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that's just me.
openSUSE and Fedora
Thanks to everyone who commented. After all the suggestions I'm still a bit uncertain on which distro I will use, but now I have basically 2 distro in my mind: Debian and OpenSuse. I will do my researches. Thanks again to everyone, this community really rocks.
Depending on your definitions of up to date and stable:
Any of the releases every 6 months distros are more stable and reasonably up to date - something like Fedora even keeps the kernel updated during those months
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rolling release with something called “openQA” that is run on the distro before releasing the snapshot to help stability. It also uses BTRFS with something called “snapper” by default, so if something breaks, you can pick the previous version from the bootloader
debian unstable or opensuse and flatpaks
Tumbleweed. And if a weekly does break something, jusr rollback.
From my personal experience you would want either Fedora or Arch Linux that's not Manjaro (not b/c Manjaro unstable, but because it can become it if you use aur with their delayed package release).
I found Fedora to be my cup of tea for gaming though it is about 2 months behind arch in terms of packages.
Whereas Arch is relies more on the terminal to download, and update packages. EndeavorOS is a good distro to try for this, but it wasn't my cup of tea especially on my laptop.
Fedora is more up to date than Ubuntu, and quite stable. Of course, depending on the exact packages you're looking for the answer might change.
I didn't think I would ever say this, but: arch isn't always the answer. True: the last time the entire system broke on me was in 2006'ish, but I can't count the times certain apps have stopped working or some python upgrade messes up things. Sure: that's the price of rolling release and AUR, and I wouldn't be without it, but it's a thing one has to learn to live with, and a thing that makes 'arch' the wrong answer to this particular question.
Arch itself is pretty stable if you know what are you doing with basic installation.
I have been using Gentoo exclusively on my desktop and ThinkPad for 7 months now and I reeeaaally like it. It's a rolling release distro but you're able to set your system to only use versions of packages marked as stable by default, then using a simple config file you can select which packages you want the newest, bleeding edge versions for. This allows you to have a customizable blend of stability and newness. With Gentoo, the package manager does have to compile your packages from source, but a lot of big packages (like Firefox or the kernel) have binary options as well, and with modern hardware most packages don't take very long to compile.
In the end you could use any distro which desktop you like (which could be Debian stable, or something immutable) and then get your applications from the latest and greatest with Distrobox
manjaro KDE
They did mention stable, which is not something Manjaro can claim in my experience. They tend to hold back packages in the name of stability but it causes problems when using the AUR sometimes.
I find EndeavorOS (Arch) to be very reliable. I use it with KDE. Gnome can be good too for a minimalistic style that doesn’t change much.
In my servers I use debian 12, but I think a good balance (stability & up to date packages) would be linux mint in my opinion.
Void Linux. A great compromise between being up to date and being stable AF. They're not bleeding edge, but cutting edge, most definitely. For example, they only recently transfered to kernel 6.3, while Arch had it months ago... with instability issues I might add. Void maintainers would rather let these wrinckles get ironed out than implement the latest and greatest.
It is a rolling release distro, so nothing new there. Packages get regular updates, same as any other rolling release distro, except for the kernel packages which are carefully examined before being submitted in the repo. The number of precompiled packages is not huge, but the src templates are (you just have to compile them from source with xbps-src, which is a piece of cake when you already have the template file).
The good thing is that all package templates get checked for buildability (test) on GH. If the template passes all tests, it makes it in the repo, if not, it doesn't, simple as that.
If you think you would be comfortable with Arch, you'd be comfortable with Void as well 😉.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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