We should be clear on our terminology here. Debian Unstable is called that because the package “versions” are not stable ( change ). It is not really a comment on quality although more frequent change also implies more opportunities for issues to be introduced. In Unstable, Debian may introduce disruptive changes either to configuration or even to the package library itself.

Regardless, taking a snapshot of Debian unstable and then separately supporting those packages completely eliminates these issues. That is what Ubuntu does.

Ubuntu LTS now offers up to 10 years of support without having to upgrade a release. This is far more “stable” than anything in Debian, including of course “Debian Stsble”. In fact, it exceeds the stability of Red Hat Enterprise.

I have not used Ubuntu in many years but I have been considering using it again for some server use cases precisely because it is now so “stable”. I still do not like Ubuntu on the desktop and do not like snaps in particular. I do not think snaps impact any of the server packages I would use though and I do not expect Canonical to introduce them during the support lifetime of a particular release.

For personal use, the 10 years of support is entirely free. That is pretty compelling.