Having up-to-date packages means having old bugs fixed as much as it means new bugs introduced. In my experience, most programs get more stable over time, and

Having up-to-date packages means having old bugs fixed as much as it means new bugs introduced. In my experience, most programs get more stable over time, and not less. They fix older bugs, add features that resolve old limitations, etc. 'Stability' is an overloaded and confusing term. In the world of Linux distributions and their variants, 'stable' doesn't mean 'less likely to crash', but just 'unchanging'. Arch Linux isn't less 'stable' in the sense that it is more prone to bugs or glitches. It's less stable in the sense that it's always up to date. The main benefit of stable distributions is that proprietary software works better on them. Hardware that only has drivers for particular kernel versions work forever. That sort of thing. They're not actually more stable in the sense that they're more reliable, at least not just because they don't update. I think they tend to have more bugs, because they tend to patch the software more and the upstream is usually better at doing that than the random Debian maintainer (or whatever) is. >Never understood people obsession with distro, whatever work for you is fine, they are all linux+open source tools Yeah there are differences though. The people that distrohop between a bunch of distros only to install the same big GNOME or KDE stack every time... I don't get it at all. On the other hand, Gentoo and Arch and Debian, for example, are all very different in the way they organise and install packages. The user experience at the end of the day isn't really so different though. It matters far more which desktop environment you use (if any) than what distro you run.