"stable" has multiple meanings, and conflating them leads to a lot of confusion. In the context of Debian, "stable" means that the software that makes up a giv

"stable" has multiple meanings, and conflating them leads to a lot of confusion. In the context of Debian, "stable" means that the software that makes up a given distribution does not change, even as the world — hardware, services, expectations — changes around it. If you take "stable" to mean "I can use the OS to do my job, even as my hardware, the services I connect to over networks, and my expectations evolve over time", then in my experience a rolling release like Arch Linux works much better. I've got an Arch Linux server for my email, git, etc that I've done virtually nothing other than package updates to for ~20 years (with two full hardware replacements "out from under the disks" in that time) and it still works as perfectly as it ever did, meanwhile equivalent Debian servers would have needed multiple brittle "upgrade the whole world" updates over the same time period and yet still would have been running ancient outdated software for the majority of that time.