[tooltalk]

Well, I noticed that CentOS/RHEL distro's have quite old versions of everything, but Debian stable doesn't seem all that cutting edge either. I find myself reaching out to backports and even sid to get what I need at times.

At my new job, we recently had that debate -- and I was quickly overruled for recommending CentOS/RHEL. My employer is a Java shop, I can almost always find rpm and deb pkg's for most stuff we need.

[rwmj]

RHEL works by backporting bug fixes and new features into the old versions. Don't go by the version numbers, check the availability of features instead.

[deadbunny]

Backporting features and not bumping versions is redicilous though, especially when that means v3.1 of upstream is different to v3.1 in your repo.

[pferde]

You're just not their target audience. Others are willing to throw money at Red Hat for this "rediculousness", though.

[rwmj]

RHT's market cap is over $20 billion today so that says it's providing real value to customers.

[jlgaddis]

FWIW, you can find newer versions of some software packages via "Software Collections".