[OT] Good or best Linux distro?

[John Colvin]

On Friday, 24 January 2014 at 16:14:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 06:01:33AM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>> While Linux isn't my primary desktop system, the desktop Linux 
>> stuff
>> I do work with has gone from Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint.
>> 
>> I left Ubuntu because Canonical was starting to piss me off, 
>> partly
>> because of their apparent obsession with being basically just 
>> an OSX
>> clone. So I went upstream to Debian. Still run Debian on my 
>> server,
>> but I abandoned it as a desktop OS partly because so much of 
>> it is
>> out of date literally before they even release it, and also 
>> because
>> once they do get a newer version of something, there's a fair 
>> chance
>> you can't actually get it without upgrading the whole OS 
>> because not
>> everything actually gets into backports
> [...]
>
> You should just run off Debian/unstable (or if you're chicken, 
> testing).
> I do.  In spite of the name, it's actually already as stable as 
> your
> typical desktop OS with its typical occasional random breakage. 
> Stable
> is really for those people who are running mission critical 
> servers that
> when the OS dies, people die. That's why it's always "out of 
> date", 'cos
> everything must be tested thoroughly first. For desktop users 
> you don't
> need that kind of stability, and generally you don't want to 
> wait that
> long to get software upgrades. So just use unstable or testing. 
> I've
> been living off unstable for almost 15 years and have only had 
> 1 or 2
> occasions when things broke in a major way. That's saying a lot
> considering how many times I've had to reformat and reinstall 
> Windows
> (supposedly a stable release version!) back when I was still 
> stuck using
> it.
>
>
> T

The thing with stability is, it's meaningless without context. 
The only thing that has meaning is stability in the face of a 
particular workload.

Mission critical servers tend to have very static requirements. A 
power-user's desktop has very dynamic requirements. Debian stable 
will be more "stable" for the server, but the same is not 
necessarily true for the desktop.