Which Linux distro does not break ?

[kansasnoob]

@kansasnoob,

You never know what breaks, but chances are it's broken from the point where it was written, or from when a patch was applied to fix bug A, thereby causing bug B.

It's generally considered best practice to stay with the latest security and stability updates for the release. That way they give you fixes for recent hacks, crashes and whatever the rest of the world discovered that was wrong with the original release point.

But without seeing actual examples of what broke and when it broke it's impossible to give a reasonable reply. I maintain computers for over 50 people and 99% of "breakage" is the result of "tweaking" things improperly - frequently by adding PPA's without understanding exactly what they're doing. No doubt kernel upgrades will occasionally "break" functionality on certain hardware, but its not a frequent occurrence.

[ajgreeny]

The only useful answer to your original question is another question back to you: what do you mean by "most of them break easily"?

I have been using Ubuntu or a derivative of it with different DE for over 13 years now with no major breakage; I have had some bugs, but not as many as I had when last using Windows, in its XP days, so I wonder what you're doing that manages to break your OS quite so easily as you seem to be suggesting.

[poorguy]

I have broken every distro I've tried.

Learn by doing.

There is nothing that humans make that doesn't break.

Ain't that the truth.

[TheFu]

I have tried many distros and most of them break easily, is there a distro which does not break ? when people say, for instance, Debian is very stable, does that mean it does not break easily ?

What do you mean by "break easily"? Be specific.

Some fringe project or almost any GUI tool can appear to break things, but it might just be the GUI that isn't working as expected. If the kernel doesn't crash, then the OS is still running. Switch to a different console and recover. The bigger the GUI used, the more likely it will fail, but that is just the GUI, not the OS or the distro.

I routinely see 30+ days of uptime on my Linux systems. In the 1990s, before we had to patch for security issues all the time, I had a system up well over 400 days.

If you copy/paste sudo commands from untrustworthy sources, any Unix OS is easy to break. I can give you 1 command that will totally trash a system, assuming the account running them can gain elevated privileges.

[1clue]

For the sake of clarity on my prior "I've broken everything I touched" post: For me the minimum qualification for "broken" is that the system was unresponsive and I had no means of fixing it without a hardware reset or power-off.

TheFu brings up an interesting point about breakage and reliability related to uptime. I used to be what's called an uptime junkie. I would leave systems up and running for as long as possible. Back before Redhat went public, I had a Redhat box with over 2 years of uptime, on an active server that was working fine. When I noticed the uptime I thought, "Hmm, maybe I should reboot?" So I did, and the system was very, very broken. Would not boot. I extracted relevant data from another Linux box it was so broken.

The reliability of a system requires that the software which is running be consistent with the software on the disk. With Linux you can have a service running, update the disk and potentially the stuff on the disk is completely incompatible with what's running. That's what happened with my Redhat box. I had been doing updates all this time, didn't yet know about this issue so I figured everything was good. The filesystems had not been checked in at least 2 years, and with a lot of server activity the data had some corruption in that time, so I lost some information.

If you get an update to a package, it's best if all instances of that software be killed and then restarted. That goes for everything from the kernel to your web browser. It seems that Ubuntu today takes care of at least some of that for you, but if you get core updates like glibc or the kernel you should really restart right away.

[23dornot23d]

Which Linux distro does not break ?

The one you do not mess around with (most Live CD/DVDs) - but then again if you did not mess around - where would all the fun be in sorting out the problems.

Always the options too of restoring from a backup - once you get used to making backups on a regular basis .......

The other option - keep many distros going on one hard drive - think I have around 30 now ........... the ones that break - you go back to and fix - or use Timeshift to bring back a restore point - and try and try again to break it .........

[pauljw]

I have tried many distros and most of them break easily, is there a distro which does not break ? when people say, for instance, Debian is very stable, does that mean it does not break easily ?

Use an LTS release, stick to installing only software from the repositories and don't try to make linux act like windows and you shouldn't have any problems. I haven't broken a system in about 10yrs. If you want to play with the latest and greatest stuff, install virtualbox and load new distros as virtual machines. Then, should you break it, delete it and reinstall it. Keeping your host system safe and stable. JMHO