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Boiling Steam's latest analysis based on ProtonDB's dataset | Linux Distros in March 2025: Here Comes A New Challenger!
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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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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People underestimate the issues that stale packages cause as well as the fragility that comes from the ways people introduce either newer packages or packages missing from the repos.
With Arch, everything is super up-to-date and you pretty much never install from outside the repos. It makes the system extremely robust and reliable (what I want from “stable”).
Finally pacman (and yay) are awesome and I trust them to do updates of thousands of packages at once. With Debian and Ubuntu, I lived in fear of those kind of updates uninstalling essential parts of my system. I had Fedora botch more than one upgrade release to release.
So, I also find Arch the most “stable” system I have used (though Chimera is looking awesome so far as well).
In the Linux world though, the word “stable” has come to mean “static” and unchanging as in RHEL and Debian. Arch is not “stable” by that definition.
I did have an issue with Arch in the past couple years. A kernel update cause the WiFi on one laptop to stop working on the latest kernel. I also have an LTS kernel install so rebooting into that brought me back up in a minute. When I checked a few days later, the problem had been fixed in the current kernel as well.