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Certainly, software is complicated, and we're always managing risk and complexity when choosing our tools.

The reality is that CentOS is a more stable platform than most of the alternatives. It doesn't provide cutting edge software across the board (though it is possible to get newer versions of common tools that people want to stay on top of, like languages), but it does provide a reasonable level of confidence that what you deployed years ago will continue to run today. Moreso than any other Linux distro out there (in my, not at all limited[1], experience), most likely. And, the security concerns you raised are the ones I wanted to address in my original reply to you; you alleged that CentOS/RHEL provided old and thus insecure software. I wanted to make it clear that's not the case; all software is subject to bugs, including security bugs, but CentOS/RHEL are not shipping software with known exploits. It gets fixed, along with the upstream. In fact, the RHEL developers are often providing the upstream fixes, as well; Red Hat employs huge swaths of FOSS developers...really good ones.

1-I work on systems management software that is installed a million times a year, on every Linux distro and nearly every UNIX variant, and have done so for ~15 years. I don't know everything, but I know which Linux distros provide a stable platform and which ones have a good security record.




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