Open Source Watershed

Ran across the Open Source Watershed this morning and found it very interesting/illuminating. One of the touted virtues of running a distribution like Gentoo always seemed to be that you had the latest greatest available when it was released, instead of waiting on a binary compatible build for your distro. Looking at these charts though, I see that the average user (all stable for Gentoo, for example) doesn’t get to see that advantage, and in fact would be better off running Ubuntu, Fedora, or even arch (2w!!) if its the bloody edge of the release their looking for.

Of course, running in unstable land, Gentoo is near the top – but its average is still on par with running the unstable of the other “big” distributions. There goes one myth – if you want to be on the bleading edge, looks like you can run whatever you want (within reason – but come on, was anyone surprised slack and debian lagged so far back?) and still be pretty close to the latest greatest.

Very interesting to see those numbers – if your an OpenSource dweeb like me, take a peek 🙂