I'm going to play devil's advocate here, but when you download debian it's mostly a binary from the web that you're going to type passwords into. But I totally

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, but when you download debian it's mostly a binary from the web that you're going to type passwords into. But I totally get your other points. See my other answer above to get a partial solution. I think the main issue overall is the lack of dialogue between sysadmins and devs. I'm a sysadmin in a dev team and we don't have that issue together, because we are deploying the right tools and making it easier for everyone. But whenever we talk to the "others" sysadmin, I see a lot of frustration on both sides because they simply don't talk the same language. Those "others" sysadmins provide the whole underlying infrastructure, and it's "latest CentOS" and nothing else. They don't have time to explore, maintain and secure other options. They don't have time to be more specific about the tooling they can provide. They just give cpu/ram/storage in the form of a VM that you order from a ticketing system or a self-service portal. And then they spend their day rebooting unresponsive VMs and opening network incidents. So they couldn't care less about your python module that's not the exact same version as your laptop. (Heck, they don't even provide R or python, we have to build it and package it ourselves and include dependancies). So they get frustrated, and the devs get frustrated, and nobody can ever work together properly. Because the right strategy is not in place. But this has nothing to do with your laptop being this or that OS or the servers running CentOS instead of Debian. It's about your pipeline from your POC to your production code, and how people before you have tackled the issue (hint : most of the time they didn't).