[bamboozled]

“my impression of CentOS is "a Linux with lots of horribly outdated software”

It is and it’s the secret reason Docker and Containers became so popular.

I’ve been a systems administrator for sometime now. At some point developers wanted to run Python 3 on CentOS 6 and here we are.

It allowed the systems administrators to let the developers go wild in their own sandbox and keep the systems “pristine”.

[ofrzeta]

There are several third-party repos to install up to date software on CentOS.

[bamboozled]

It’s better now, wasn’t there when Docker came along.

You also missed my point, the infrastructure teams already built stable infra on CentOS, the work was done. They didn’t always account for people wanting to run new versions of Imagemagick to process user uploaded photos, . This is what developers needed. They wanted to pipe curl through gunzip to get what was required.

Docker ticked the boxes for devs and ops.

[ofrzeta]

Maybe I really don't get your point. I don't know about ImageMagick because as far as I am concerned there have not been any important features that made be want to use a newer version.

What I did want though, was newer versions of PHP, Python and GCC. They could be gotten through either the Red Hat Developer Toolsets (which by themselves are a great way of packaging the compiler because you could actually have different versions on one machine) or the IUS repos (as the acronym implies "inline with upstream stable", also a great achievement).