The word “stable” usually means unchanging through a release. I.e. functionality of one release is the same if you stay in that release even if you update (security and bug fixes mostly). The experience of the system not doing anything unexpected like crashing is reliability. A rolling distro is by that definition not stable, but it can be more or less bug free and crash free.
No, it doesn’t the only unchanging distro is debian, and they do it mostly out of resourse constraints not because it is a good idea. Like the only lts package that debian does update is linux kernel. Everything else is patched for vulnerabilities at best, left to rot as stable as a rule.
A bold claim. RHEL updates are mostly security patches, are they doing that due to lack of resources too? Is it that hard to imagine that enterprise distros don’t want surprises from changing functionality?
Let’s be real, RHEL and Debian aren’t even close on what and how they give you. Better not compare them because it wouldn’t be a comparison. They mostly do security patches but when needed they actually backport features, they support every version far longer, they don’t ship packages that were outdated 20 years ago because no one can support their aging infrastructure, they actually rewritten absolute majority of oldie initscripts so you don’t need to remember how to disable an init script for a given run level, and so on.
After years of rhel moving to debian was like moving ten years in the past and to a very poor neighbourhood. Sorry if it offends you.
Edit: Anyway what I actually wanted to say in the previous post most enterprise distros aren’t religios about it, like debian is.
