this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it's worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that's been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it's "stable" you're in for a world of pain.
If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you'll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any "unstable" equivalent, because you won't be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you'll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you'll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.
Stable distros absolutely have their place, there's nothing wrong with them and they're typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they're designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they're designed to do.
I disagree that stable distros aren't good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.
And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.
As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn't fall back to it.
I'm not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.
Tl;dr there's more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.
That’s an excellent point.
I run a brand new GPU, I like to play both very old and brand new games. I sometimes overclock my hardware, I’ve been really into modding games in the past.
Stable isn’t really how my gaming ecosystem is on Windows either. Not to mention Windows, Nvidia, AMD etc have always had a element of instability to it. I’ve ran beta updates on my PC for years and also do that on my phone. The amount of times I’v messed around in regedit, cmd, bios, eventviewer etc. is beyond what I can remember. I’ve been adopting windows versions early since Vista came out too.
I’ve never really been happy with stable. Maybe I this question should be «Arch vs Fedora» instead, but I’m not cocky enough(yet) I guess 😂