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Comment by carlosrg | Hacker News Reader

>the default software is the latest stable version

That's debatable. I don't consider the latest upstream versions "stable", no matter what they think - I've been using Linux long enough to know this the hard way. I think for people new to Linux (and for people experienced in Linux that don't like bugs too) a more conservative distro like Ubuntu LTS or Debian works much better in the long run.

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If I come to linux to try a new way of doing things and get the benefits like a package manager. When I read a blog about some cool new release of software like docker or node and I want it. If `<package manager> install <software>` doesn't get me that and I have to arse around finding sources to add. I'm not saving any effort than just going to get some msi from a website.

Agreed. I used to use so-called "stable" distros for the longest time because that's what our installed software was supported on. But when I couldn't use the latest and greatest development tools (emacs for instance), it became really annoying doing my development. So I switched (from RHEL/CentOS) to Fedora for my day-to-day development. I can't say I've run into any show stopper issues, our software and the supporting software run just fine on it and I'm a happier, more productive developer.

Just curious, why you couldn't use latest emacs in RHEL/CentOS? I think emacs is quite easy to compile.

It's been quite awhile, but, IIRC, glibc incompatibilities in particular as well as other general libraries that weren't easy to build and compile. I make use of a ton of packages that require other current components that weren't available on "stable" releases. Changing hasn't presented any stability problems, so, for me, Fedora has been a good, stable distribution that still lets me use my tools.

EDIT: Please note, my experience may or may not relate on CentOS7 or RHEL7, this was more CentOS 5 and early 6 versions where I ran into issues.

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