Hello,

I want to know what the most stable flavors of the Linux OS to install on a laptop.
I have a few laptops with Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 as dual boots for 3 of them and I like
using Linux Mint Xfce because of the low overhead for a laptop OS, but it is a bit buggy for my taste. Even though most people want to know what the model of the laptop is, my question is meant for any laptop universally.

Thank You.

"It is impossible because it hasn't been thought of yet" My Quote

Hello there,

seems you are asking a similar question that has been bothering me for some time now.
Generally if you are using laptops, you want a lightweight distro. I myself use several distros depending on laptop specifications, but if you want it to be just as good on a low end laptop and a newer and better one, you might want to consider arch linux and just use a lighter desktop environment on the low end laptop.

Another option I found works great is Chakra, currently I am running it on an Acer aspire one netbook which is very low end and it works surprisingly well, but if you want, you can use it on a better laptop and get even better results.

I really do not understand how this question is being asked. I mean have you looked into the minimum requirements of any distro. I have debian on my laptop but then I start with bottom down. I install only the bare essentials and then I move on to what I want and what suits me. This would be true for any other distro. But then debian has vast repos so packages would be easy to come by. eg. do not install office software - use kdeoffice package, do not install firefox use dillo. The main strength of a linux distribution is that you can choose what you want and what stays out. So if you want a light desktop do not use gnome or kde - get fvwm or xfce. There are a million combinations that can be done. If you are specifially using a laptop then get the laptop-tools package - powertop is something I use very often here.
Hope this helps.

You're right about that. Your odds of finding a meaningful solution to your stability problem will increase if you take a minute to tell us about your hardware.

The most stable distro is, IMO, Debian Stable, currently Squeeze. It's not the newest, or the prettiest, or the easiest to install, but it's the most stable, because that's the primary goal of Debian Stable. It should run on any laptop that meets the minimum requirements, and you can find those on the Debian website.

If you mean "stability" as "Does not crash if left alone." then it depends on the drivers available for the laptop -- if there aren't any free drivers then Linux cannot be guaranteed to be stable. In this case the distro is largely irrelevant.
If you mean "which is least likely to break through an update" then I'd say stay away from the *buntus as they're based on unstable branches. So if you like apt-get then go Debian stable, otherwise use Slackware or one of the other well-known stable distros.
I'm not sure why it being a laptop matters here.

I use LMDE Xfce and have tried other distros. Vector Linux Standard is a great alternative to that. It also uses Xfce, and is based off of Slackware. Try the live CD out and see if it suits you. They use the Cairo dock, but that's easy to remove with a couple clicks. Overall, I found it much more stable than LMDE Xfce, and was very impressed with it.

If you need a 64-bit capable distro though, you might have the best luck with Debian stable amd64.

I like Arch, but I wouldn't bother with it if stability is a priority. Sure it can be stable, but you have to be ready to fix it whenever an update hoses your system.

My personal opinion:
Go for Slackware! It runs equally fine on my netbook (630 MHz CPU, 512MB RAM), my laptop (dual-core 2,2 GHz CPU, 4GB RAM) and my workstation (6 core 2,8 GHz, 8GB RAM). But that is only a personal opinion. The same should be true for any of "The Stables" (Slackware, Debian, RHEL/CentOS/SL). The only problem you can encounter when using newer hardware is that you may be have to run a newer kernel than the default one.

+1 for slackware. But then again this is a personal opinion...

The only distro I have found to run on every machine I tried is Knoppix, wireless always works and only found one graphics card that needed help from xorg.

The model of the laptop (or desktop) matters because laptops are not all the same.

Saying "I'm talking about all laptops" is like asking, "What tires should I put on my car? Don't ask me what kind of car it is. I want to know which tire fits every car."

Your question has no answer other than, "It depends."

I think most people use "Rubber Tyres" on a large variety of different cars, therefore some general advice should be possible without specific details. Following on from that I guess the way to go would to be "try what most people have already had success with", my vote remains with Knoppix or Puppy, they would be my "Rubber Tyres".
Good Luck with your experimentation
Dave

The biggest issue with regards to Linux on the laptop is POWER. Battery life is no where close to what is achieved under Windows. This needs to be fixed as it is a serious drawback to running ANY current kernel distro on a laptop.

I've found Debian Squeeze to be a very stable and capable Laptop distro.