I am looking at switching from Ubuntu to Fedora. Ubuntu is based upon Debian but not as stable as Debian. Unfortunately Ubuntu changes too frequently for my taste.

If I want a stable Fedora, then which version should I use? In other words, should I go for the most recent Fedora, the one before it, etc?

Thank you.

Fedora is a bleeding edge distribution that is acting as testbed for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It has a very short support cycle (releases are only supported for 13 months) and is known to be sometimes buggy due to its bleeding edge state.
So if Ubuntu is too unstable for you switching to Fedora might not bring you want you want to achieve.

A agree. If you want stable and want to try a Redhat based distro go with CentOS or Scientific Linux. This from a long time Fedora user.

Fedora is less stable than Ubuntu (only 13 months vs. up to 60 months for Ubuntu), bad choice for your needs.

You might be interested in CentOS (based on Red Hat). It is an .rpm distro like Fedora but is super-dooper-stable (many years of support).

Or.... switch to Debian. As you yourself point out, it is similar to Ubuntu (except very stable).

Wow, thank you for the replies. So Fedora is a fast moving distro.

What if I used a slightly older version of Fedora? For example, 17 is the current version. What if I used 16 or 15? Would those be considered "stable" by now?

Or, would you still suggest I use something like CentOS or Debian?

Thank you again.

Honestly, FC17 is stable enough right now. I would definitely go with version 17. But, that is for Fedora. The choice is really up to you now....

If you want stability go for Debian or CentOS, maybe Slackware if you plan to learn more about Linux.
Using older versions of Fedora is not an option. Fedora 15 is unsupported, which means it gets neither security updates nor bugfixes. Fedora 16 will be unsupported in the near future.

Fedora is probably "stable enough" for the average home/hobby/student user. It will give you an experience comparable to the non-LTS releases of Ubuntu. (The Ubuntu LTS releases are very stable and supported 5 years.)

Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific is rock-solid stable but uses very old software (roughly comparable to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in package age but arguably much more stable due to longer testing period). In fact, Fedora users are essentially the beta testers who make Red Hat's stability possible.

My recommendation is Fedora/Ubuntu for home/hobby/educational use (so you get the latest applications and hardware support) or CentOS/Debian for sever/laboratory/business (for extra stability on certified hardware).

Thanks so much for your input. I will mark this solved.