I have been directed to the above distros as being the most stable currently in existence, what do you think?

Let me know if I'm missing one, and I'll start a new poll...

Why Debian 'stable' of course... it's geared towards stability and that being your only criteria....

I wonder why a lot of people don't care to vote...

Kind of an apples to oranges comparison. Slackware and Arch are "build-your-own" distros, so they're as stable as you make them.

Debian is the most stable of binary distribution installations by far. Stable is the epitome of "rock-solidness" but it tends to get dated. Right now it's so stable it's barely breathing. Compared to the other major binary distros, Debian Testing is the Rock of Gibralter. Very unlikely you'll ever encounter a serious bug, but it's possible when critical subsystems like Xorg are undergoing major version changes. Even Debian Unstable is more stable than new releases of other binary distributions.

The price you pay for that stability is a lot of tweaking on your own to get functions that many of the other distros provide for you. You also have to put up with support from grumpy of men who tend to be impatient with newbies. We like you to learn Linux on another distro, then move to Debian when you're "ready."

What is Debian compared to Ubuntu? More challenging or in-depth? I would like to get into a more challenging distro-my recent problems with have been with installing a program for dial-up on a computer that has no access to the net other than that at all...

http://www.debianadmin.com/setting-u...in-ubuntu.html

this should work for Debian or Ubuntu

lol-thanks farslayer, but I was able to figure the problem out with a lot of help from others in the forum...