Debian vs Slackware Stability
 

These Distros are the Kings of stability and outdated packages. The argument could be made that even their unstable versions (current and sid) are outdated. I think Debian is more stable. As their outdated fork of firefox has to make it more stable.

Though this doesn't make Debian better :)

Slackware isn't really that outdated in most cases. And no one forces you to keep older releases anyway - you're perfectly free to make a package for a newer program and update it whenever you feel like it. I regularly update several apps to the most current version (my Nvidia driver, Wine, my web browser, and a few others). This is a lot harder to do with Debian, if you want to keep a working system.

I use both and have for years.

I really must abstain, because I can't choose.

If you run the latest version of Slackware, it is not outdated. You get regular updates as well, mostly for stability or security.

They are both quite stable. I vote for Slackware because I use it.

I cant really speak for slackware, I'm not a regular user. But in my experience, slackware and debian are both very stable.

Pity you didnt have a 'roughly the same for stability' option in the poll.

Umm....try centOS/Red Hat for some really 'outdated' packages. Mind you, centOS/Red Hat has the same sort of stablity as slackware and debian stable, possibly they would be even more stable.

Now that I think about it since Slackware is pretty vanilla that could also make it a lot more stable. And while Slackware has outdated packages there really not that outdate when a look at them.

"Stable" can mean two things:
1: Only security updates. No new versions of software just for the sake of newness.
2: Doesn't fall over, break easily, explode.
One thing Slackware and Debian stable have in common: they are released WHEN THEY'RE READY. Unlike some other distros... ;)

Actually, unlike most other distros, especially major distros.

Slackware -current is more stable than Debian stable IMHO
hands down

Stability depends mainly on how you use your system I think.
Sometimes, people come from windows OS, do everything as root etc..

???
I got the latest Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey with the regular updates on Slackware, looks not outdated to me.
Anyways, I run Debian on my fileserver (still to lazy to change it to Slackware) and it runs 24/7 without any problems for months. I think the same will be true if I change it to Slackware. So your poll is missing an option here: Both are equally stable.

"Outdated" can be in the eye of the beholder. What one person might consider outdated because it's v. 5.6.x instead of v. 5.6.x+1 could be in another person's view considered "proven."

"Not the very latest" is not the same as obsolete.

My two favorite distros. I use both, and cultist hit the nail on the head. Its a lot harder to upgrade packages in debian without breaking other things. I am torne but am going to have to give a vote to debian but only because of what I said above. By upgrading packages you risk bringing in a broken package, while debian has a repo set up with packages that are supposed to work well together. So while I sometimes I wish slack had dependency checking, if it did, then it would probably suffer the same limitation debian has.

What he said.

Between the two, I slightly prefer Slackware because I find it simpler and more straightforward as regards the organization of /etc, and I prefer Slackware's boot-to-the-command-line-by-default way of doing things. Indeed, I made my Debian boot to the command line most sweetly.

I may be influenced by having started with and learned on Slack. And those are matters of taste, not of stability.

It is interesting that two such very different distros could end up as our two favorites.

Both. I started out using both after Caldera Linux broke me into linux.

I like a stabel os, and both Slack and debian provide that. I may have been just as easily swayed by CentOS if i had have heard of it first. I am yet to try Cent/Redhat or even Suse enterprise Linux, so i can't make a comment on them, but i'm slightly turned off by the corporate influence, and as for now. Slackware and Debian are suiting me fine.

After using Debian I'm pretty angry I voted that it's more stable. Debian's okay (not my cup of tea) but the dependencies make it less stable in my opinion.

I agree, and sometimes you hit Debian-specific bugs.

I will admit, i have encountered bugs where i've installed software on Debian, and they haven't pulled in all the dependencies, but i don't regard that as a point against Debian in references to comparing it with slackware, since pkgtool doesn't pull in any packages.

My vote goes for Slackware.

While Debian 5 (Lenny) was a great version in terms of reliability, I find the current one to be an absolute regression. Debian 6 (Squeeze) was frozen before it should, and many "non critical" bugs were not fixed and eventually passed into Stable. Worse yet, many worrying bugs were marked as fixed because there were fixes available, but the fixes themselves are not currently included in Squeeze and the defective software remains in affecting the users.

The two first examples that come to my mind are a bug in PCmanFM that can lead to massive files destruction and a bug involving amule and wxwidgets that can cause memory exhaustion in a DoD style suicide. The PCmanFM one caused me a loss of some thousand of files, yet is marked as solved and has remained unpatched for more than 400 days.

Slackware has its own set of little bugs, but none of them is so disruptive, and I can live with them. The most annoying one I face is a segmentation fault that happens to XPDF when you pass many pages quickly under certain configurations. When you compare the current Stable releases of both distributions, you get newer apps and libraries in Slackware while having improved reliability.

Don't take me wrong, I used to really like Debian. I still think Debian security policies are among the best ones. However, Squeeze is not up to my demanded quality level nowadays, and I don't really care if Debian has the latest anti-DoD patches when amule stills DoD itself without assistance.

I voted for Debian as it's the underdog in this poll... but personally I regard Debian and Slackware as the two best distributions available.

As to outstanding bugs, I don't think there is any distro which releases 100% bug free. Debian admittedly have a lot more to deal with than Slackware, as they support many more architectures, desktop environments and have much larger repositories.

Does this looks outdated? http://slackware.com/changelog/

I have been using Debian for many many years before I switched to Slackware and I cannot vote either way, both seem tremendously stable to me. However, I have to say that Debian stable is definitively more outdated than Slackware and, if you go <stable>/Sid way you kinda lose a bit in terms of stability (however I don't recall having any problems caused by mixing stable and Sid.)

I was a longtime Debian user, that switched to Slackware. I would say that Slackware is both more up-to-date, and more stable. I just updated my Slackware 14 this morning, with Firefox 20, etc.

I used only Debian (and Ubuntu before it).
The original question is which is more stable. It probably depends a lot on your particular hardware and software configuration.
I installed Squeeze (Gnome) for my parents right when it came out. They havent used a computer before. But i had no stability issues whatsoever with that computer. Ever. It just works (i use only the stable repos on it).

On my home desktop i have Testing (mixed with unstable and even experimental, self-compiled packages here and there + self compiled kernels) and it runs 24/7, has a VM runing in the background permanently. Never had any non-self-inflicted stability issue with it despite the patchwork of packages from all repos (but i dont use third party repos, only for specific programs that dont exist in the official repos, the rest i recompile myself if i itch for a new version). Note that it has an AMD A8-5500 Trinity APU and i run the fglrx driver on it.

On my laptop i have largely the same setup (except its 32-bit and use only debian kernels on it). I carry it everywhere (i work on customer support/network administration) and i expect it to work perfectly stable when i open its lid (which it does).

Now, given the above, i can say that Debian IS stable (even when i mixed testing/unstable/experimental - i am agains mixing stable with anything except backports though). The dependency system is actually quite nicely designed and implemented + it has probably the largest repositories out there.

In my opinion, Debian and Debian based distros handle dependencies the worst way. Ignoring a dependency should be optional, but .deb based distros make this very hard. Even rpm distros handle this pretty well.

I couldn't disagree more. If you know what you are doing you can easily use the --{force,no-force}-depends or --ignore-depends= options of dpkg to install or remove packages without dependency errors. But the whole point of a dependency resolving package manager is to never leave the system in a broken state, otherwise dependency resolving would be pretty pointless. You actually never should have to do something like that if you aren't a developer (or have very special needs, in which case you either should learn how to create proper Debian packages or switch to a distro without dependency resolving).

No, with a Debian 'Gnome-session' installed try removing Nautilus without removing Gnome-session, it is very difficult. The 'ignore-depends' parameter does not work very well; at least for me.

In that case not the package management ssystem is at fault, but the package maintainers. The problem here is that they use meta-packages for ease of use. If you build up your Debian from the base install without using meta-packages this problem doesn't occur at all.
In short, this is a maintainer problem, not a problem that is caused by the package-manager.

Really? i'm skeptical, but will have to confirm this for my self. I will post my feedback on this in the following month approximately (Can't do it sooner due to being away for work.)

Look at the size of Debian. And remember that the package maintainers can only test programs on their computers in their environment. It's inevitable that there will be things that don't work perfectly on your computer in your environment: i.e. bugs.

Slackware, with a much smaller repository, is bound to be much easier to maintain. And if you get something from Slackbuilds or wherever, you're not going to blame Pat if it gives you trouble. As a basic install, Slackware should be better, and when I tested them both it was.

I am a ubuntu user at work for quite some time. Tried Debian Wheezy, quite a few times and really wanted to ike it. I got erred time very quickly. I still have 100GB for Debian.
Now I settled on Slackware 14. Installing packages is difficult, But I am pretty happy with Slackware's performance and stability on my Thinkpad T61.