Linux

openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's not stable as in unchanging but it is stable as in reliable.

I feel like something like Fedora fits the bill: great, reliable, well-maintained repositories, decently updated kernels, yet never faced any major issues, and access to quite updated packages. Only issue is Red Hat caused a stir recently, though I still believe Red Hat does more good than bad in the open source community.

What is your definition of stability? I have used Arch for about ten years without any major breakage, but sometimes you do have to do some manual tinkering if a package stops working. So it's stable enough for me, but maybe not for others. Since it is a rolling release, packages are generally being updated quite rapidly.

I think that any modern rolling release distro would fit the bill though.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a great choice for a rolling-release distro that is also really stable too.

The holy grail, stable and up-to-date, it exists, it's called Debian with Flatpaks.

Install Debian. Avoid doing any changes to your package selection, try to get things from flatpaks.

Debian testing (more up to date than ubuntu, rolling release, much more stable than the name suggests, truly free as in freedom)

NixOS would fit the bill if you're not afraid of something different. With Nix it's trivial to cherry pick from unstable channel if you still want a stable base.

Fedora. Switched after years of Ubuntu and never looked back.

This really depends on your definition of "stability".

The technical definition is "software packages don't change very often". This is what makes Debian a "stable" distro, and Arch an "unstable" one.

The more colloquial definition of "stability" is "doesn't break very often", which is what people usually mean when they ask for "stable" distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it's going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.

I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it's only ever broken because I've done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn't broken since. However, I've also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you'll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.

Just like the holy grail, stable and up-to-date it doesn't exist. Stability and recency of software typically constitute a tradeoff. Human software developers produce some number of bugs per line of code. Unless all changes made to a piece of software are bug fixes, new changes mean new bugs, almost invariably. Therefore the only way to stop the increase of bugs in a piece of software is to stop the changes to it or only do changes that address bugs. In the context of distros, a stable one is a distro where the number of bugs stays constant or decreases over time. This is how Debian, Ubuntu and every other distro that locks its software versions for a certain release work. After a release is out, only bug fix changes are permitted, with some special exceptions. The idea that there are multiple types of stability is a bit of a false narrative. Adding features, adds lines of code, which increases the number of defects. This is a fundamental fact of software engineering that's actively managed during the development cycle of most software. A collection of software like a rolling Linux distro that receives a constant stream of new features may feel bug-free to specific users, however that is typically a coincidence. Just because those X number of people didn't hit any significant defects during their usage, doesn't mean that you won't. This is true for every distro, however stable distros generally have an ever-decreasing number of bugs over their lifespan. In addition, bugs that are never fixed can be documented, workarounded and the workarounds will keep working for the lifespan of the release because there are no changes.

With all of that out of the way I hope it's clearer why there's a tradeoff between stability and recency of software in distros. There are various strategies to have a bit of both and they typically revolve around letting the bits you want be recent, while keeping everything else stable. These days the easiest and most foolproof way to get new software is via Flatpak or Snap.

You could of course abandon stability and go for recency via some rolling release distro and see if you step on any significant bugs. Maybe you won't and you'll be happy with that. Many people are.

As a personal and professional Linux user that lives with and maintains a significant number of machines, I typically go for a stable base like Debian or Ubuntu LTS and update only the software I need via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. I no longer use PPAs. This provides a great balance between stability and recency. But that's just me.

debian unstable or opensuse and flatpaks

I use to be like you. I used Arch for a long time then tried everything else that was similar like tumbleweed etc. Then I used Fedora and forgot about distrohopping entirely. I still use Arch on my pi4 though because it works nicely for use cases like that.

However I will warn you anything can and will be unstable eventually. Its the nature of software, bugs will happen. For instance recently a package called ostree was pretty much broken on all distros even Fedora which is crazy.

Thanks to everyone who commented. After all the suggestions I'm still a bit uncertain on which distro I will use, but now I have basically 2 distro in my mind: Debian and OpenSuse. I will do my researches. Thanks again to everyone, this community really rocks.

openSUSE and Fedora

From my personal experience you would want either Fedora or Arch Linux that's not Manjaro (not b/c Manjaro unstable, but because it can become it if you use aur with their delayed package release).

I found Fedora to be my cup of tea for gaming though it is about 2 months behind arch in terms of packages.

Whereas Arch is relies more on the terminal to download, and update packages. EndeavorOS is a good distro to try for this, but it wasn't my cup of tea especially on my laptop.

Fedora is more up to date than Ubuntu, and quite stable. Of course, depending on the exact packages you're looking for the answer might change.

Arch itself is pretty stable if you know what are you doing with basic installation.

Tumbleweed. And if a weekly does break something, jusr rollback.

I didn't think I would ever say this, but: arch isn't always the answer. True: the last time the entire system broke on me was in 2006'ish, but I can't count the times certain apps have stopped working or some python upgrade messes up things. Sure: that's the price of rolling release and AUR, and I wouldn't be without it, but it's a thing one has to learn to live with, and a thing that makes 'arch' the wrong answer to this particular question.

manjaro KDE

In the end you could use any distro which desktop you like (which could be Debian stable, or something immutable) and then get your applications from the latest and greatest with Distrobox

I have been using Gentoo exclusively on my desktop and ThinkPad for 7 months now and I reeeaaally like it. It's a rolling release distro but you're able to set your system to only use versions of packages marked as stable by default, then using a simple config file you can select which packages you want the newest, bleeding edge versions for. This allows you to have a customizable blend of stability and newness. With Gentoo, the package manager does have to compile your packages from source, but a lot of big packages (like Firefox or the kernel) have binary options as well, and with modern hardware most packages don't take very long to compile.

Depending on your definitions of up to date and stable:

Any of the releases every 6 months distros are more stable and reasonably up to date - something like Fedora even keeps the kernel updated during those months

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rolling release with something called “openQA” that is run on the distro before releasing the snapshot to help stability. It also uses BTRFS with something called “snapper” by default, so if something breaks, you can pick the previous version from the bootloader

In my servers I use debian 12, but I think a good balance (stability & up to date packages) would be linux mint in my opinion.

Void Linux. A great compromise between being up to date and being stable AF. They're not bleeding edge, but cutting edge, most definitely. For example, they only recently transfered to kernel 6.3, while Arch had it months ago... with instability issues I might add. Void maintainers would rather let these wrinckles get ironed out than implement the latest and greates.

It is a rolling release distro, so nothing new there. Packages get regular updates, same as any other rolling release distro, except for the kernel packages which are carefully examined before being submitted in the repo. The good thing is that all package templates get checked for buildability (test) on GH. If the template passes all tests, it makes it in the repo, if not, it doesn't, simple as that.

If you think you would be comfortable with Arch, you'd be comfortable with Void as well 😉.

I find EndeavorOS (Arch) to be very reliable. I use it with KDE. Gnome can be good too for a minimalistic style that doesn’t change much.