[johnwfinigan]

Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes.

A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out.

Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.

[ethbro]

Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y.

And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.

[johnwfinigan]

On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux!

Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.

[ethbro]

Granted on the upstream point! Especially with how quick transformative technology goes through its various phases, it may be essential (/Strangelove emphasis) to make the harder choice now so that you're not behind your competitors in the near future.