alt Hacker NewsWhich is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?
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I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
I've never had issues with Debian based distros.
My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release. I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.
Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.
A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
I've been running Arch (on my desktop and servers) for over a decade, and never had issues. Just read their homepage before upgrading.
Debian Stable.
The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.
Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.