[_yy]

The author also seriously recommends Arch Linux and Tumbleweed as alternatives. Anyone who ever maintained a server in an enterprise production environment knows how valuable the kind of stability that the author criticisms is. Not everyone lives in a DevOps environment where you can "move fast and break things".

He does have a point about unmaintained packages, though. Debian probably shouldn't package things if they cannot support it over the lifetime of the release. Why would I ever want to use a two-years-old Wordpress version? I never understood why those kinds of applications are even packaged at all.

Most sysadmins deal with this by including a third party repository for applications and Elasticsearch (any many others), often by the authors themselves, which takes care of security and version updates. This eliminates most of the concerns. You get a rock-solid operating system and an up to date application on top of it. Web applications like Wordpress or Owncloud aren't usually deployed using distro packages at all.

[acdimalev]

Countering one of your points, and yet bolstering your statement here. Even in a DevOps environment, packaging is important. Same as a system image or random artifact, a distribution package can provide consistency and repeatability.

If I had to wait for a rebuild of the entire operating system to test deployment of a single application, how much confidence could I possibly gain in that application's deployment process?

Also... it seems the author is suggesting that newer software always has fewer bugs. Hmm... .

[msl09]

For 99% of such packages all I really want is to be able to apt-get build-dep.

I suppose that in those cases guix would be the ideal system.