| Follow @jrssnet
West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
Yes, I think you are - by far - the exception.
I'm also a little curious as to exactly what you consider "staying current" on packages means - by most definitions, that MEANS "current" with your distribution's repositories. If by "current" you mean "absolutely to the last decimal point with whatever's on the vendor's site" - well, by most standards that isn't "current", that's more like "beta".
The repos aren't just there to compile your code for you, they're there to provide QA (distribution-related and otherwise), integration, and security testing. They're also there to provide security backports specifically *to* older versions of software, in order to provide a more stable environment in which you can build more software to reliably depend on a given environment.
I am not being disingenuous - which I'll note here is a synonym for "dishonest", and a pretty offensive accusation to make. I am, I repeat, sitting on a total of zero non-proprietary packages compiled on Debian or Ubuntu Linux, either on workstations or servers, for the last seven years.
Being "behind current", when "current" is defined as "the very newest version available on the vendor's website" is a FEATURE, not a bug.
I'm not sure why you think compiling from source is still considered a "viable installer for everyone". Have you even *installed* a Linux system in the last five+ years?
I haven't needed to compile non-proprietary software from source *one* *single* *time* since switching my own workstations from Windows to Ubuntu seven years ago. Similarly, I have not compiled any software whatsoever from source on any of my production Linux servers in the same timeframe.