> "The more i have had to deal with the Linux ecosystem, the less i want to do with the bleeding edge of it."

Sure, but that's not what I was getting at. If the bleeding edge of Linux didn't have any attractive features, hardly anyone would use the features from it in their desktop OS.

Consider a use case. Take gaming for example. Let's say you want to get the best performance for gaming on Linux, so you don't have to upgrade your gaming rig to play a game that your existing rig should be able to handle. As far as I'm aware, there have been quite a few improvements made to GPU performance in recent kernels, particularly with AMD. What distro is going to be best for Linux gamers?

You could use the newer kernel with Debian Stable, but as the age of the platform grows, there's a high chance of mismatches between libraries. In other words, if you stick with the stock distro then stable branches have benefits, but if you introduce any new features that haven't been through the level of testing given to the stock components the guarantees of stability go out of the window.

As a contrary anecdote, Arch Linux has only gotten more stable for me over the past years. I'm running it in multiple servers and had only one incident where a downgrade was necessary (which is not particularly hard either).

>I'm running it in multiple servers

You're the only one.

Eh, I also do that and in fact, archlinux.org and all of its servers are also hosted on Arch Linux. It works really quite well and there is little reason to suspect it should be any less stable than other distros.

Last I checked the Arch website was run by a Debian box, not to mention funded by Debian.

I'm fairly knowledgeable about our (Arch Linux) infrastructure because I set up a big chunk of it. I'm not sure where our donations come from, though.