Is "obsolete" the correct word here? Just because a software package isn't the most recent version doesn't mean that it is obsolete. Depending on the distribution, it could be that the older version is better tested than the most recent version. In that case, you may value stability over the hottest new feature. Let's put it this way: if half of your distribution can be considered obsolete in 2 weeks, your metric is BS.
I suspect that "How obsolete is your distro" is to be taken less than seriously. This site provides interesting statistics regarding the uptake of new versions in popular distributions, the meaning/worth of which is very much left open to the reader. I certainly didn't find any implication that more obsolete means less valuable on the site.
Such as? I'd usually use "deprecated" to imply what you think "obsolete" implies; "obsolete" simply means that there's something newer intended to replace the older one.
And it's why I love CentOS/RHEL or Debian on servers.
Stability and predictability is vastly more important than having the most new-fangled of everything. Fedora or Ubuntu (non-LTS releases) are nice desktop systems, and they have all the latest fancypants stuff built right in, but I'd laugh someone out of the room if they suggested running them on a server. Arch doesn't even appear to have an official policy on lifecycle, so it's definitely not in the running.
Ha, you want lifecycle? Arch (and its father, Gentoo) doesn't just not have an official policy -- the whole point of the distro is to not even have versions or freezes, much less support them.
Every Gentoo and Arch install is a special snowflake, with whatever the latest stable versions were when a package was last updated. Rolling releases are awesome -- the software doesn't have to ship in a goddamn box!
RHEL + Debian are constantly backporting and patching so much crap onto their 'frozen' versions of upstream software. For them 'stable' means that you get the pain of updates without any visible features, with the added annoyance of hacked-in patches from people who didn't write the software.
There is a reason why Debian does backports: to get the bug fixes and nothing else. Why on earth would you want new features on a production box? If new features are added, something could break. If features are removed in the new version (and this happens more often than you might think) something could break. If even the command line arguments change, something could break.
For this reason there's pretty much zero pain to Debian Stable updates. I cannot even think of a single instance off the top of my head where applying buxfixes on a Debian Stable box has caused any problems at all.
> I cannot even think of a single instance off the top of my head where applying buxfixes on a Debian Stable box has caused any problems at all.
Well, a certain commented-out line in OpenSSL comes to mind :-)
But seriously, I refuse to run anything other than Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, or a stable BSD tree on my home systems. I rely on my desktop more than I rely on any given server, so why would I put something less stable on it?
I rely on my desktop more than I rely on any given server
Sure, we probably all stare at our desktop machines for hours a day, and only poke at our servers for a few minutes each day. But, an hour-long outage of my primary server will effect hundreds or thousands of people. An hour-long outage of my desktop will effect only one guy. I'll spit and sputter and curse a lot, but it probably won't cost me business or customer good will.
That said, everytime something breaks on my desktop machine running Fedora, I think "Hmmm...maybe I should be running CentOS here."
Arch is related to Gentoo in that both offer rolling updates and try to keep you on the bleeding edge. They differ in that Gentoo is a primarily source-based system with binary packages bolted on and Arch is a primarily binary-based system with source bolted on (admittedly, Arch has better source support than Gentoo has binary).
Arch also compiles it's packages for i686, to appease the gentoo-ricers.
Their goals are similar, so you could argue that Gentoo inspired arch, but they are unrelated.
It's really not even inspired by Gentoo. Judd was always quite clear that Arch started it's life as Crux with a more automated package manager. The ancestry still shows in the BSD style init, the use of tar.gz as the package format, and the almost identical package build syntax.
The only reason people keep mentioning Gentoo around Arch is because Arch is occasionally concerned with speed and they're both seen as nerd distros.
well said, im disappointed by the misconceptions posted here about arch.
rolling release does not mean you have to upgrade to python 3 if you still want to use python 2.6. it is very trivial to configure pacman to ignore certain packages.
