According to you.. What is the most stabel distro of Linux...

I use slackware.. IS the best..

Quite a coincidense, I had to do a small asignment on a less known OS, and I've chooses Slackware, because I've used it too for a while.
It apeared that Slackware is the oldest available distro and that it wan't to be the most UNIX-like OS without all the fancy graphs, all for more stablility.

I've uses Slackware for a long while, only crashing one time (it hung and only resetting could bring it back to life) it proved to be a good OS. But that doesn't make it a more stable OS than other distro's, I've used Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, Slax, Knoppix, ... they all work very stable (except maybe Fedora C4, we use it at school and konqueror sometimes crashes, but that seems to happen in every distro I've used so far).
But that vision might change if I switch completely from windows to linux, because so far, I haven't done anything heavy with linux).

Hi arifmuslim

This is a loaded question

At the end of the day you will find that the stability experienced by you depends on the usage you intend putting the Linux distribution to. As an example:
I really enjoy Ubuntu and have found it rock solid. (no crashes etc). However, it does not always give me what I want. As such I have to download unsupported code, compile and install it. Alternatively I have to add additional unsupported sources to the apt configuration files.

The reality is, every time I add some unsupported piece of software to the server, I am risking it's stability. Any crash attributable to my code can not be pointed at the Ubuntu team, nor is it a reflection on the stability of Ubuntu. At the end of the day my system may not be stable based on all the add-ons I added. Yet the pure Ubuntu distribution is rock solid.

However, if I had to select another distribution that had all the built in features I required, my system would have been stable. No single distribution will give you everything (In fact loading everything is a bad idea as well: security, performance, manageability).

If you are talking long term support life, have a look at the Ubuntu support


Initially I would look at the what I want to use it for, work out what I will need and choose from there.

Which car - erm Linux - is the best? Ubuntu
Which *ix is the best - Solaris!

This post has been edited by mrhapl0: Dec 20 2006, 02:56 PM

Maybe for a good stability you should use Ubuntu. I realy like that distro, It has changed the concept of many people about Linux.

It has a very good support and it's got very easy interfaces for almost any task you should do.

Anyway if you are a more experienced user you may like fedora or gentoo.

It's still Linux, so therefore they are generally the same, so there's no "safer" distro. However, there is one distro version where it would become unstable with my systems, which was Mandriva.

Other than that, all are stable.

xboxrulz

The question in fact is probably something like, wich car drives best ?
Everybody will answer something else (someone would say a ferrari while someone else would say a volvo).
First, you can't answer the question (okay, I did ) if you haven't test every distribution for the same period and doing the exact same things with it during that period (wich I didn't ).
First of all, stability depends on your system, I for example ran my computer overclocked for a long time while keeping the voltage low (for temperature/noise reasons). Explorer would crash from time to time because of the low voltage (I accepted the crashes, since nothing would be lost execpt a few seconds).
Second, the hardware configuration is realy important for linux, because linux drivers suck, especialy for new or rare (or expensive) hardware. The best example is my computer, I hear people shouting it from the roof that Ubuntu is the best linux OS ever ... it just won't boot on my computer.
Tirth, versions, updates and patches, newer isn't always better, bot older isn't either. Newer kernels support newer hardware, are safer but can still contain bugs.
Last but not least, you are a factor too, if you go tampering with the kernel, you might do something that could make it less stable than it was supposed to be, installing software, changing that software etc. can all make your system less stable than you hoped for.

In quest of curosity I have tried a few of the distros.
One of the most versatile and bleeding edge is gentoo. All the diffcult part is the installation, which is a bit non-standard. But no regrets after that. Debian is another favourite one on stability. Debian is a perfect when you are a Sys Admin (I feel). Slackware is stable, but the worst part is when you need to have a solution and you are frantically googling your way.. you seldom find a page for slackware. Slackware is for a very few geeks. However, one of the good things about slackware is, its versatility in letting you do most difficult things easily. I once installed Xen on the slackware, and after spending toomuch time I couldnt get the virtual networking achive a DMZ. I moved on, and achieved that very easily on debian. I moved to gentoo and I was stuck again, and then I got a brilliant article on Slackware explaining virtual networking, with which I trouble shooted the gentoo problem. But I admire the author of slackware for the indepth explanation.

As someone already said, usage defines, which distro appears good for you.

Slackware has always been very stable and reliable for me. I have tried about every distro variant out there. Slackware and Linspire/freespire were two of the most stable distros. I can't say the same for Ubuntu or Mandriva, or even SuSE. I really like Ubuntu and SuSE (not so much mandriva) but they just haven't been very fast or reliable. They were always buggy, slow, and programs crashed all the time.

I found that the more you built your own packages and didn't install from a prebuilt repository, the more stable your system was. For this, I tried Gentoo. Turns out Gentoo was even less stable than Slackware. I had some conflcting packages when installing K3b, and KDE completely crashed and refused to work. Pretty soon, for some very odd reason, my computer refused to even startup fully.

I never really had problems with Linux and all were stable for me, except one time I had a problem with KDE session and most of the time it was me playing with configuration files and testing, but I solved/resolved it.. I always was using Gentoo and now for some time moved to Arch Linux, which I really think suits me the way I want to.. Of course I have used such distros as Kubuntu and Ubuntu, SuSe, but they don't really suit me, it is not what I need

This post has been edited by Quatrux: Jan 27 2007, 10:56 AM

the Slackware is the most stable distro.. but Slackware isn't for slackers
I'm using Slackware 10.0 as my home desktop and it is a pretty desktop system. I enabled 2.6.7 stock kernel added with Con Colivas patch (CK5) as the unique "non default" component (I like supermount..:-) and others adds).