[monoideism]

Obviously, perfect stability and perfectly up-to-date packages are not possible, but I think Ubuntu LTS is a good compromise. I've used Arch (which I enjoy using to improve my understanding of Linux w/their excellent docs), Debian, Fedora, OpenBSD, etc and I always find myself going back to Ubuntu LTS for my work machine.

Lots of projects also put out PPAs with frequent releases for Ubuntu, which are ideal if you need the very latest and greatest. Just realize that you're relinquishing root access to every PPA you add, so be very careful whose PPAs you install, and try to limit them to the extent possible (same applies to any apt repo, obviously).