[skydhash]

> they are extremely conservative, and if that is all you need, then that is great

You don’t need to live at the edge of new features. Do you upgrade your fridge and your oven every two months? It’s nice when you can have something running and not worry that the next update will break your software and/or your workflow.

[exceptione]

Sure, but these are development dependencies we are talking about. Running old versions of these dependencies block your projects. But it isn't limited to self-developed software, quite often for of the shelve software you run at the same problem.

To each their own, but this is the reason I advice newcomers to stay away from Debian based distro's. I don't intend a distro flamewar, it works perfect for `boring old and feature complete software´ like Dovecot.

To add: containers would alleviate a good part of these concerns, but the stupid thing here is that precisely that is broken for up-to-date podman workflows.

[skydhash]

Your test system should reflect your prod system. Why run Debian if you intend to deploy on the latest ubuntu? Unless you want to use VMs. For other stuff that does not alter the system that much, you can find more recent version in the backports.

[exceptione]

It has integration with systemd, but moreover, I think the promise of Debian-derivatives is one of "we are boring and old, but also boringly stable". Now, throwing in backports undermines that promise. I think one is better of with a distro that moves faster.