I think that it's because it's boring which in terms of economics translates directly into savings and safety. Look at RedHat, it has some really nice tools and

I think that it's because it's boring which in terms of economics translates directly into savings and safety. Look at RedHat, it has some really nice tools and frankly always had, but if you made it the backbone of your platforms engineering team for the previous 30 years. Well, then I think you would've have needed to "reschool/retrain" your engineers 3 or 4 times as the tool chain has changed drastically. Which is obviously not as dramatic as it may sound, but compare it to Debian where things operate pretty much how they always have. For some organizations there is benefit to continuously improving their platform engineering, but for many, technology is a tool that's required to do something else. They don't want to keep up with changes, and sometimes the changes aren't useful for them. On HackerNews most of the content and users are technology focused, but in the real world its the opposite. There is a reason why many enterprise organizations still run stuff on mainframes as an example. It's not because they want to, many have even spend hundreds of millions trying to exit, but the thing that's the most important is the stability to their core business. Now I don't want you to get the impression that I'm drawing a comparison between Debian and mainframes, my point is simply that to many organizations the ability to provide a stable support the core purpose of the organization is more important than anything else. Debian does that.