Timothy Murphy:
I find the use of the word "stable" absurd in this context.
Tim:
Stable meaning without significant changes, rather than meaning extremely reliable operation...
Timothy Murphy:
I guess I give a rather mathematical meaning to the word "stable". A ball in a bowl is stable. A ball on top of my head is not.
An unstable kernel is one that fails in an unpredictable way, eg filling the screen with garbage.
The context was "Debian Stable" was it not? (Wasn't too clear, but it seemed that way.) Which I took to mean a Debian release that was *not* like a test release. One with a long life that didn't expect to change much over it, which makes it very easy of developers of other software to work with it.
If one was comparing, say CentOS to Fedora using the testing repos, to be extreme in the example, CentOS being stable, Fedora being not.