> Arch does this, Gentoo does this, NixOS does this, why does Debian has to be different?
I say this as someone who ran Gentoo for years and daily drives Arch today.
Because sometimes you don't want entire swaths of your server being rebuilt/tinkered with on a regular basis under the hood. "Move fast, break everything" is great in dev/test land, or a prod environment where the entire fleet is just containers treated like cattle, but contrary to what the SREs of the valley would believe, there's a whole ecosystem of 'stuff' out there that will never be containerized, where servers are still treated like pets, or rather, at least "cherished mules", that just do their job 24/7 and get the occasional required security updates/patches and then go right back to operating the same way they did last year.
I say this as someone who ran Gentoo for years and daily drives Arch today.
Because sometimes you don't want entire swaths of your server being rebuilt/tinkered with on a regular basis under the hood. "Move fast, break everything" is great in dev/test land, or a prod environment where the entire fleet is just containers treated like cattle, but contrary to what the SREs of the valley would believe, there's a whole ecosystem of 'stuff' out there that will never be containerized, where servers are still treated like pets, or rather, at least "cherished mules", that just do their job 24/7 and get the occasional required security updates/patches and then go right back to operating the same way they did last year.