For the past few months, I've been trying out the newest Linux distributions, and they all seem buggy as hell.

Before upgrading both my computers, I was running Fedora 14 on my desktop, and OpenSuse 11 on my laptop. Besides OpenSuse sometimes failing to wake-up from hibernate properly, both distributions were as stable as one could hope.

I had some free time, and decided to upgrade to the newest versions of the distros. After upgrading, OpenSuse 12 would just randomly and completely lock-up on my laptop, and on Fedora 16, Gnome Shell would crash about every 30 minutes.

After experimenting with with different distros, I finally settled on OpenSuse 12 on my Desktop, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta on my laptop. This is better, but KDE on OpenSuse, and Gnome Shell on Ubuntu still occasionally crash. Whereas, I never had these kinds of problems with the previous distribution versions I was using.

What's going on with the new versions of these distros? Have they become more lax on testing or something? I'm tempted to install Debian Stable on all my computers and just manually compile and install the newer versions of the software that I need... but then I'd probably have to deal with dependency hell

As far as I am aware Ubuntu doesn't support Gnome Shell, you must have installed that from a PPA. So you are using a development release with a PPA, no wonder you are having trouble. Try sticking to stable releases without PPAs and you may have better luck.

... so install Sid

I'm new to Ubuntu, and not sure what a PPA is, but Gnome Shell is in the "Universe" repository, and apt-cache says it's maintained by, "Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>". I installed it because Unity has a huge sidebar that wastes space

Fedora is the testbed for Red Hats enterprise distribution, it is cutting edge and is known for sometimes having problems. You should be aware of that if you use Fedora. I don't know much about openSuse, so i will not make a statement on that. Regarding Ubuntu 12.04, it is still a beta. That means it is known to have bugs and it only makes sense to install that if you want to be a part of the beta testing process and report the bugs you find. Despite that, Ubuntu is not really known for being bug free, in my eyes that is simply not possible with such a short release cycle.

I would recommend to use Slackware instead. Rock-solid, no dependency hell, the software is as cutting edge as you want it to be.

Hi,

Anything that is bleeding edge will tend to have issues. That is why it is available for testing.

So the answer to your thread title is that it is your lack of understanding for the distribution(s) tested and being aware that things do break.

Not all Gnu/Linux will have issues for the platforms they are built for. Sometimes you will need to tweak things to get everything working. Familiarity with a distribution will hopefully prevent things from failing since you should be aware of the need(s) to tweak for the system or know where to look for the necessary information to correct issue(s).

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We Know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."- Samuel Johnson

You may be interested in Fuduntu, which is basically a "fork" of Fedora 14, maintaining the Gnome 2 desktop while updating the kernel and applications.

http://www.fuduntu.org/

Otherwise I agree with some of the comments above; there are plenty of super-stable distros if you know where to look.

Fuduntu is very good, also very new: the repository is still tiny.

For Gnome 2: Fuduntu or CentOS
For Gnome 3: Mint or Parsix.
For KDE: Mepis or OpenSUSE
For Xfce: SalineOS or Salix

No bugs here (only features!)

If you like Ubuntu and are used to the way it works and want stability try Debian stable. I'm suing a modified Debian Sid/Experimental (see my signature for details) and it is rock solid. I used Ubuntu for about 4 years and it was never as stable as Debian unstable is.

Thankfully, with open source, we are not limited to apps from the repository.
My experience with Fuduntu is that, because it is based on Fedora, it is easy to find .RPM's.

Gday, From personal experience, i've had issues with Ubuntu, but never used Fedora. I use Opensuse 12.1 with kde every day and find it very stable.
Do you use mobile broadband by any chance?
I do and found freeze issues like you mentioned when trying to connect. I've since upgraded kde to 4.8.1. in the kde changelog there is this;

Since the kde upgrade, i've experienced no freezes and everything works smooth. Just my experience.

I think the issue of OpenSuse 12 locking up on my notebook had something to do with the wireless card driver/system, because it doesn't lock up on my desktop computer. Whatever the problem was, it was very low level, possibly kernel level, because the whole system would lock up, not just KDE. KDE does occasionally crash on my Desktop (I can still ctrl-alt-F1 to get to the terminal). This may have something to do with the proprietary AMD Catalyst drivers I'm using, but Fedora 14 behaved well with the same drivers.

I realise that these are all "bleeding edge" distributions, and bugs and quirks are to be expected, but the newest batches of these distribution releases seem to be much more buggy than previous releases. Was just wondering if others have noticed the same thing, and the possible causes for the increase in bugginess.

It is good you realise this. I stopped using Ubuntu for various reasons, one of which it was getting harder to use because of bugs that had been left unfixed for multiple versions. That is why I now use Debian and as I said previously Debian Sid (unstable) is less buggy than any stable version of Ubuntu.

Distros released around the same time will have the same Linux kernel, Xorg, drivers, etc. so it stands to reason that if your hardware is not currently well-supported, you'd experience bugginess across multiple distros.

Personally I am a fan of 2.6.32 kernel (Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, Red Hat, CentOS, etc.) but that's for my hardware; your mileage may vary.

I'd agree with this with the qualification that the release date is a factor but so it the determination of the developers to squash the bugs. Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian 6 are the same with regards to specification Debian held on for 1 year more than Ubuntu did. Ubuntu released a buggy version, Debian released squeeze when it had already proven itself to be rock solid through thorough testing.