On 6/16/10 7:07 AM -0500 Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Noel Butler put forth on 6/16/2010 6:49 AM:
I will never use debian or its derivatives for its outdated crud, and I would rather not use RHEL because of its old but patched methods, gentoo and slackware are the only two serious "Linux" OS's that should ever be in a serious data centre, IMHO.
That's an interesting position/observation given that RHEL, SLES, and CentOS (RHEL derivative) have the largest datacenter footprint in the US by far. Across both oceans, mainly Europe and South America, SuSE rules pretty much everything, from what I've read.
All the numbers I've seen show Slackware and Gentoo at the very bottom of the charts, almost zero penetration. Debian has far more datacenter penetration than either of these.
Partly that's due to mindshare or just plain "what I learned in college".
But mostly it's because most software, by far, are internal applications. These are written to specific versions of system software and may even depend on specific bugs ... er, features. The more and bigger of these apps you have, the more you want your system to be "stable" and could care less about having the latest and greatest, modulo security issues.