I've been falling in and out of love like a very drunk member of a college Greek organization at a party of an organization of the opposite gender, only with distros.

I'll find a distro I love, only they keep putting out new releases, which are FRIGGIN' WORSE! They take away madwifi, they make an error in USB support, they add improved USB support but take away something else. Then I speak to experts on the topic and they recommend a mythically stable and competent version of a distro from 2003.

So can someone tell me what this road to progress in new releases is all about? Is it security? Do they first put together something more secure, then throw all caution to the wind with everything else, dropping them as need be promising to put them back in later? I see another distro I'm about to fall in love with, but it's only at an "RC5", and I'm worried what changes will happen by the final release.

So for example, if I were to go for the very least "stable" and newest version of Debian, what could I expect relative to the version released in 2005?

Sorry to rant to much.

If you want things to be really stable and pretty similar, Debian "stable" is the front runner in my opinion. The current goal of Debian is to release a new stable version every 18 months or so. So you'll see a lot of changes since linux technology moves pretty quickly. But the Debian "stable" distro will be thoroughly tested and debugged much more rigorously than any other distro. Once Debian releases a stable version, no new programs are added to the repositories, just security updates. So on the current stable 3.1 (sarge) you'll only have OpenOffice 1.1.3 and Firefox 1.0.4. So the downside of using stable is that your technology might get a little outdated. That's fine by me as I don't like to break things. But other people prefer living more on the edge and getting the newest software in a reasonable amount of time. The trade off is that things will be much more fluid. You can of course run a semi-bleeding edge Debian install by running "unstable". Unstable really is as stable (or better) as say Ubuntu or Fedora.

Here's a link about Debian's package acceptance and how packages migrate from unstable to testing to stable.

As for how Sarge compares to Woody (the previous stable), Woody was released on July 19, 2002. So there's a lot of really old software on there. No 2.6 kernel. No KDE 3.3 like in Sarge, let alone the KDE 3.5 recently released. What's changed since 2002, that's what will be different in Sarge. Most everything I use still works the same though when I dist-upgraded. The next release will be the first to use Xorg instead of xfree86 (sarge still uses xfree86). And on and on...

your rant wasnt misguided or even wrong, but you might have missed the point a tad, no offense meant.

Linux "wasnt" about stabiliy and standing still, it was about power, options, open ideas and freedom that we havent seen since the birth of the net itself. With that comes chaos. Each person , or distro creating group has its own oppions, ideas and was of doing things. Some like debian and redhat have fought for linux supremacy and a good money base. Others hide in shadows and yank every kernel update and keep there undergroumnd disro`s deep and hidden. Now recently Ubuntu/kub8untu/edbuntu/xbuntu has been released. Ubuntu is promising years YEARS of stability, usefullness and updates. Redhat is also majorly stable and ncie for years and fedora sits slightly more up-to-date but still can be enterprise used. YOu need to find the more mature and more stable distros that work for you, and dont always gobble up the updates, some people live bleeding edge, other live stable..............as with all thigns open source, YOU have the options and no one tells YOU what to do..........FOR THE RESISTANCE


-kirk

Its rarely possible to get everything working at the same time. So the kernel and some core libraries get updated, but the maintainers of other packages have to keep up as well. Not so easy with so many packages maintained by people all over the world.

Sorry to contradict you, but I think Debian and Redhat are very different animals. Debian strives to be completely free, both as in freedom and in beer. It is completely community driven with no corporation driving its path. Ubuntu, an offshoot of Debian is trying to take up the corporate pushing part of the equation. Ubuntu will be offering security updates for years. Debian offers security updates until a new version is released (on the order of 18 months, although the last release took 3 years...)