I run Debian stable, but occasionally my entire system freezes up -- the mouse doesn't respond to anything I do, etc. and it usually requires a restart.Another minor issue is that Nautilus' search functionality seems to be totally broken.These things aren't a big deal at all, but that makes me wonder what is meant by stable in the very first place -- I somehow doubt its supposed to mean stability for home desktop users, as there are simply too many home desktop computers with different hardware/software configurations to ensure stability.So, what does Debian mean by stable?
What does stable mean in the context of Debian stable?
debian;stability
A stable release has no serious bugs in it, in a nutshell. Before a release, bugs that are deemed sufficiently serious are marked release-critical, which means they must be fixed before a release and usually are. This does not mean there are no bugs. I have personally not encountered any bugs I would consider serious in a Debian release.After stable is released, the only fixes that are generally allowed are security related bug-fixes. This criteria has been loosened a bit in recent years, for large and complicated packages for which security related bugs are difficult to backport. The chromium web browser is an example. Another special category is -updates (earlier volatile), which contains packages that are time-sensitive, like packages related to spam detection. However, these are special cases that do not compromise the overall integrity of the system.The major drawback of a Debian-style major release is that, because of the freeze period and the release period (typically 2 years in recent releases) the software can get badly out of date.