I'm going to get a new laptop (that time of the century again) and want to know which distro is most stable for using java8, eclipse, android studio, codeblocks, glade, mysqlworkbench. Well, those are the most important apps anyway.

I've been mooching about lately trying various distros but it's not until you start using them in anger that the real pro's, con's, delights and bugs start to reveal themselves.

I've used Linux for over 20 years (starting with RH6.0).

I recently moved from Ubuntu 14.10 to 16.10 but compiz seemed to hammer the cpu and really slow things down. So I jumped to Fed26 which seemed better but less "gamey" : along with stability I also like a real neat desktop. I discovered Mint18.2 (I love it's hot corner workspace switching) and have been using it for about a month now but oh boy it's buggy. Seems unfair to list these problems here because I really like it but : Cinnamon crashes, network permanently fails after suspend, app-sources duplicates, gnome-keyring buggy, strange non-existent files appearing on desktop which cannot be deleted (really weird), constant updates every day. So I just can't trust it. At the same time I don't want to end up on another distro that's got similar problems.

I think anyone who has used Eclipse will attest that you - at the very least - need to be able to _surely_ trust that your OS is actually working correctly(?)

Anyway, guessing that I'm used to Deb then I suppose a hike back over to Ubuntu-ver??.? is gonna be my best bet?

New laptop's gonna be an i5 3340/8Gram.

SO : any devs out there using the same apps/ides as me got better ideas? (fyi, it takes me about 3-4 days to get completely up and running on a new os : especially since I usually forget to install the cvs binaries [because they used to be in the distro] and spend ages trying to work out why the ide vcs pluggins won't work).

if you want a stable distro, use debian. If you want to buy a new hardware, probably ubuntu 16.04 would be better. Otherwise stability mainly depends on the configuration and the device drivers. Probably I would go with 16 GB RAM.