With all due respect i disagree.
upgrades can no be tested on everything so there will be breakages on any OS .
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There are a few things that I think make this discussion a challenging one
- The word stability can be correctly used in many different ways.
- We all have different expectations when it comes to stability. These range from the system not crashing to every feature of every application working perfectly.
- Both hardware and installed software differences play a big part in stability so my system may have no breakages while someone with different hardware and different packages installed may have a different experience.
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That is correct. But proper release management catches more breakages than no release management. Debian for example catches many of these issues. Therefore a statement like âArch is the most stable thingâ can not be true by the facts.
That is not true you just have to follow the Debian forums to debunk that argument,
What ever distro you use has problems for some users and not others, that includes Windows, and Mac to a certain degree one size does not fit all even in a closed wall system, to many parameters to cover.
Arch and slackware are the distros that software devs favour, Debian patches only for Debian, Software devs patch for everyone
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It depends how you define stability. If you define stability as the system not crashing, Arch could, in some circumstances be more stable than Debian, if you run the LTS kernel.
On the other hand, if you are referring to application stability, there is simply no way that Arch is more stable than Debian. Not only does Arch usually get new applications releases in there x.0 state where bugs are more likely, it has a rolling base which applications sometimes take time to catch up with.
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Actually, in hindsight, weâre way off topic here discussing distros. This thread started off being about DEs! 
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This has absolutely been my experience. Iâve had a lot less problems as Iâve had a more âminimalâ system. Less things = less things to go wrong. I find that is true with nearly EVERYTHING in life. Other than less money - I think thatâs the only thing I canât imagine less of being better. But literally everything else it seems - less is better.
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Finally got Cinnamon set up how I like it on 
so Iâm running with that, but Xfce remains my fallback.
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Iâve got Cinnamon on my âsecondâ desktop. It took a bit of tweaking to get it to how I liked it but I am pleasantly impressed. It feels very kind of solid and unified. I remember trying it in itâs early days and I always found it unstable, with frequent freezes, but now it has evolved into a very nice DE. Itâs easy to be productive on it because itâs fairly simple to use and doesnât get in the way. Not my favourite DE but a good solid backup that I am happy with.
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If there were no KDE anymore, Iâd be on Trinity.
Anything but Unity 
No KDE? What you talking about? I think maybe i go back to Cinnamon itâs a lot quieter there! No issuesâŚno fussâŚno muss! Cinnamon rarely has any issues. Just use it! Stop playing around with stuff and it donât break. Itâs the kind of desktop you donât need to constantly be messing with.
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I never âgotâ the dislike of Unity when it came out - or later. At the time (limited vertical screen real estate) it was easily the best workflow available - and not just on Linux. It is amazing how many of Unityâs feature set have become part of KDE since!
Some people were even complaining about the return to min/max/close buttons returning to the normal position on the left (3 seconds to select your choice btw) - which was always kind of funny as the same people were often vitriolic about Windows, the only place of significance the âright sideâ location was used!
Oh - and vert screen comment - it was the âglobal menuâ, and the fact that it can be a loooong way to the top of the screen these days - or I would be more than likely using it now (some of my builds have the fusion icon switcher for wm/compositor installed).
The amazing thing was that it took only a couple of hours to adapt to it (coming from Gnome 2), and a couple of days to incorporate the key shortcuts and the HUD into the workflow. It didnât hurt either that the âgoodiesâ of the interface (cubes and Magic Lamps &c) came for free!
Cinnamon is my favorite DE because they are modern and follow the K.I.S.S. philosophy.
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I would be there on Cinnamon, but I canât find good docs on modifying theming for it. Havenât managed to get it to look quite rightâŚ
Also - it âeffectsâ donât work right (create transparent chunks out of the screen). Too bad - it seems OK otherwise, and handles hi-dpi better than most.
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You have to turn off Window effects in (Effects)
Yeah - but what if I want them? I havenât seen them yet 
âŚ
They werenât around when Cinnamon started out.
Not even sure what it would do. All these little things donât matter too much to me as long as the desktop works properly and doesnât constantly have issues. But i also think a lot issues happen because people are constantly messing with settings that donât always work with everything. A lot of these things i donât even know how they work or what they do because i donât tend to change them much. On KDE i change only a few things and they are the things that always work. No issues.
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Yes, the documentation is lacking, and the Mint team switched to sassc for building their own themes which has made the process more obscure.
A starting point of sorts are links in this Mint forum thread by smurphos (who unfortunately (at least for the rest of us) is on a timeout from development - see here).
My own efforts have got no further than editing tooltip colours and menu transparency.