Background information:

My oldest computer died at age 11 (1996 to 2007). On it I dual booted windows 98 and in it's last years some version of Ubuntu.(started with fiesty)

My next oldest computer is eight years old (2002 to ?). On it I dual booted Windows 2000 pro and Ubuntu Hardy. I was pretty happy with hardy after the pain of tweaking it to actually work.

My system always started with a command line install of Ubuntu and a custom openbox gnome system. I've always used wine in the linux system.

My eight year old system started get the hiccups lately. (not booting or sometimes not even powering up)

So I built a new box. I decided not to even install a windows version. I tried Lucid. Way too many things broken. I installed Karmic and it works fine. Still a bunch of stuff broken but I can live with it.

Every new Ubuntu system has broken something that just used to work on the old system.

I'd like to try a system where I can find out why! new users are not members of the audio group or the dialup group. It's stupid to troubleshoot audio when all that's wrong is that you are not a member of the audio group.

Most of all I'd like to have the same system in six or eight years. The only things I upgraded in Hardy were pcmanfm and wine. Nothing else needed it.

I think if I went with debian testing that might be a solution for the rare cases I might need to upgrade something.

I'm sort of attracted to Arch for some reason. I tried Antix live recently because it was so close to where I usually end up.

Bottom line is that while I sort of enjoy the challenge of a new OS and new hardware, the reason I have a computer is to listen to music, watch videos, writing, spreadsheets and web surfing.

I don't want to worry about or fret with either hardware or OS in between hopefully long lived systems.

I used to be a lot more hard core and compile and even write software. I still might and have recently tweaked scripts and source code.

That kind of hard core stuff I'd just as soon leave to someone else.

If I've been clear about what I'm looking for suggestions are most welcome.

I really don't mind the cli or editing configuration files. What I really hate is not knowing what to edit or why.

If you are willing, then try a BSD.
I use OpenBSD and FreeBSD and can say that they are stable.
You will need to do a bit of work.

Then try arch
Or go for slackware

Slackware or Debian stable.

I find Slackware the most reliable distro so far.

After giving it some thought I realized this is partly a hardware issue. I would have kept hardy as an OS for a long time except it did not know what to do with some of my new hardware.

There are very minor improvements in the software for Karmic but it handled my hardware very well.

Maybe an example would help. Pcmanfm was broken in the version shipped with karmic. I downloaded the version from Ubuntu Lucid. This is the type of thing I might need to do on fairly rare occasions. So it's actually more a package management issue than a distribution issue.

A package manager that can install an upgrade or fix without breaking the system is what I really need.

Aptitude is okay and I'm very used to it but it's sort of inflexible on some things.

Part of what I do now is repair, upgrade and test old junk computers and install linux on them. The refurbished computers are provided to low income and elderly people on a sliding scale. I have a pretty good idea what non geeks can adjust to. A fully tweaked linux box is mostly point and click for what my clients need/want.

From that point of view the easiest distro to install on a wide variety of old hardware is the best.

Fortunately I keep a decent partition for testing new distributions. I'll try Antix first. From what I can tell the repositories are debian testing.

Next I'll try Arch.

If neither is quite right I'll try Slackware. I can report back if anybody wants to know.

I might be wrong, but can't you see a little inconsistency here:

Your title:Your decision:
If you REALLY ask for a very, very stable distro, I'd stay away from anything with 'testing' in the name. LOL

Slackware. Releases are maintained (with security patches) for a lot longer than other distros.

One of Arch's main features is a rolling release cycle. That has many advantages but maximising stability is not one of them.

As I mentioned I was going to try various distributions. Since I have very old hardware and fairly new hardware to test on I'm willing to try new stuff.

In some ways Arch might be more stable in the sense that I'm unlikely to destroy the system by upgrading one package. Same logic for Debian testing.

I'm not into upgrading for the sake of upgrading so I don't want necessarily to be on the bleeding edge.

On the other hand I don't want to wait years until improvements are approved by the more stable distributions.

Antix was tested on both old and new systems. It works on both.

That said I don't see why going with Debian directly is a disadvantage. I believe I'm skilled enough to develop an Antix like cd installer that would more or less work on both old and new hardware.

The bloat of mainstream distributions is not needed on new hardware and is a killer on the old hardware. I've proved to myself that a linux system can have a decent desktop and use less than 80MB memory and even under browser stress rarely even approach 256 MB memory.

I'm actually looking at this problem from two different directions so perhaps my original post title was slightly off base.

When I refurbish an old donated computer for somebody else it needs to be as rock solid stable as it can be. I can teach them the basics of the menus, file manager, web browser and email client. They don't want or need to know why any of those things don't work right or how to fix them.

I want a simple easy to install system that works on most hardware for them.

For me I'd like to use the same basic sytem at home for myself at a more advanced technical level. I'm used to having to adapt and overcome on my own system.

I'm beginning to think my original post was incorrectly titled. Yes I'm interested in a rock stable distribution. I'm also interested in ease of use and customization.

Ubuntu has done pretty well for a few years. It's getting harder and harder to use it for a custom system because they are doing too much bundling and decision making for the user.

Anyway I don't regret posting the topic. If nothing else it has helped clarify my thoughts.

I would like to thank each and every one who posted for taking the time to respond.

I can't believe you are seriously thinking about Arch for this purpose. (No disrespect to Arch intended.) Have you considered Linux Mint? It's available in a full range of desktop environments depending on the capabilities of the hardware. If the computer is too old for even the Fluxbox version of Mint, then perhaps Puppy is a good choice.

Try Mandriva for stability. The package management system is solid and it have one of the best Control Center around.

I've just installed mdv-2010.0 LXDE version on an old IBM Netvista machine with 512mb of mem, and so far so good.

Slackware!, you cant go wrong.

Debian stable.