Linux

I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

Debian is sometimes frustratingly out of date for daily apps like the web browser. I'd rather recommend something with a bit more updates like Mint.

with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.

every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.

Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn't have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.

Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn't the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.

It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.

downloading software from the browser? Are we windows users?

The correct solution (as with languages on websites) is to auto-detect but then make it super easy and obvious how to change if the auto detected version is not what the user wants.

Also if any web developers out there are reading - don't use the user's location to determine the language/region they want, and especially don't force it. I have no idea why so many websites do this but those responsible deserve to permanently have small amounts of sand in all their socks.