That didn’t take long.

You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”

Debian aims for rock solid stability

To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”

Its enough for me too. But not everyone has the same use case and environment. I definitely see why someone would want this.

What I disagree with is that it needs to communicate to the internet to do this. It adds delay and potential for outage if your internet is out. But they do this so they can force you to get their app and milk you for extra data to sell. Internet capable smart devices are to harvest data not grant features. Features could be done better by ZigBee and a hub, but that doesnt grant the device a way to phone home

Oh good, if that is all true, you wont have to change anything to be compliant with new laws and should have no issue with them.