Stable mean unchanging. Stable does not mean free of faults.
I don’t know anything about MS Windows anymore, but I tend to doubt it’s as stable as Debian Stable, since we are constantly getting accused of being “too old” because of our stability policies.
Alaknar@lemm.ee 6 days ago
To me “stable” means: “fire and forget”. Maybe a reboot needed every couple of months because something broke, or having to kill a hung process. That’s my experience with Windows nowadays.
I’m on Garuda Linux, which is based on Arch Zen, and every now and again something random breaks. Network connection doesn’t stand up after sleep. Steam randomly breaks. Signal refuses to connect. One monitor’s brightness doesn’t go back to default value after the OS dimmed it due to inactivity. Uninstalled application still shows up in Application Launcher’s search results, even though I deleted it from the KDE Menu Editor.
Lots and lots of little things like that.
bss03@infosec.pub 6 days ago
That’s not the definition of stable.
My Linux desktop required about a reboot a week, but I think that’s because I was using a kerne and syatemdl from Debian Unstable. When I’m getting both of those from Debian Stable, I only reboot when there’s a security fix in one of those.
I do have a couple of issues I work around on a daily basis, but they aren’t even bad enough for me to open a Debian bug, so I don’t expect them to change/get fixed.
Also, I refuse to blame Linux or Debian when I acquire and use software outside of the Debian repositories.
Alaknar@lemm.ee 6 days ago
How about this - I configured Kate to have full Markdown support, with preview.
There was an update today. The Document Preview plugin got disabled and once I enabled it, it’s no longer able to display Markdown preview.
That’s what I call “unstable”. Shit randomly breaking for no reason at all. And I know it’s probably SOME dependency SOMEWHERE that got updated which broke a DIFFERENT dependency, but that’s kind of my point - things like this just don’t happen on Windows (since around Win10).
bss03@infosec.pub 6 days ago
I didn’t get an update today. That said, I believe you, but I can’t speak to the stability guarantees of your software provider unless you name (and shame!) them.
I doubt this would be considered a release-critical bug in Debian, so it is certainly possible for breakage like this to occur between releases. If it was a security issue, then … I hope you are assuaged that your old way was a vulnerability that needed to be disabled for you safety. While distributions and developers try to avoid such breakage, sometimes it is inevitable or just the result to trying to minimize the vulnerability window, chronologically speaking.
I do think that MS Windows users got surprised when their Notepad experience changed unexpectedly recently. Maybe you don’t consider that equivalent, but it is instability.
Anyway, my experience is that Debian Stable is more stable than the MS Win 10 laptop issued by my previous employer. And, I don’t know of any rigorous studies comparing the Linux stability with MS Win stability, so I’ll tend to prefer to be guided by my experience. (And, I don’t expect you to abandon your experience in favor of my anecdotes.)
(Honestly, I’d probably still be using Free Software even if it was less stable that Proprietary Software, but I am glad Debian Stable does focus on stability and I do support most of the policies they use to implement it.)