Which is better: osu!stable or lazer?

[IdeiGeniale]

I think that lazer is better for casual play, but its not made for competitive play.
i also like lazer for multi-device support, lazer is supported on mobile and pc, compared to stable which is locked to pc.
i also like stable, since its better for competitive play, and still the "main" version of the game.
BUT WHY IS STABLE GETTING SO MUCH IGNORANCE COMPARED TO LAZER? that is actually a good question.

[failaip12]

Stable is feature locked for years already for many reasons. Some of them being the fact that it's apparently a codebase that's hard to work with, and the obvious fact that limited time, money and manpower is better spent on developing lazer, bringing more FAs to the game etc.

[GabuTheDev]

BUT WHY IS STABLE GETTING SO MUCH IGNORANCE COMPARED TO LAZER?

osu!stable has been around for years, and like any long-lived codebase, it's accumulated a lot of technical debt. Changing one thing requires updating everything that depends on it, which requires updating everything that depends on those things; you end up in a recursive spiral just trying to ship a single feature.

Rather than endlessly patching a system that was never designed with modern scalability in mind, the osu! team chose to rewrite the client from scratch. osu!lazer was built with extensibility as a core principle, meaning new features can actually be added without the whole thing fighting back.

This isn't a flaw unique to osu!, it's one of the most common problems in software development.
A rewrite isn't admitting defeat; it's just the most sensible engineering decision available.

the osu! team will not maintain two different codebases for the sake of having options. osu!lazer is supposed to replace "stable" somewhere in the future, so working on both makes no sense.