CentOS vs. Ubuntu

There are no benefits that I can discern for using CentOS (or RHEL) over Ubuntu if you are equally familiar with using both OSes.

We use RHEL and CentOS heavily at work, and it’s just painful — we’re building custom packages left and right because the OS doesn’t come with them, and paid RedHat support is worse than useless, being chock full of "pillars of intransigence" who see it as their duty to make sure you never get to speak to anyone who can actually answer your question. (I’ve heard that if you spend enough money with them their support improves markedly, so if you’re a fortune 500 you’ll probably have better luck than we do — but then again, if you’re fortune 500 you’re probably chock full of useless oxygen thieves internally anyway, so it feels natural to deal with another bunch of them)

That much-vaunted "hardware support" pretty much always comes in the form of puke-worthy binary-only drivers and utilities that I’d prefer to avoid by almost any means necessary. Just choosing hardware that has proper support to begin with is much less hassle than trying to deal with the crap utilities.

The long-term stability of the OS platform isn’t a differentiating factor — Ubuntu has LTS (long-term support) releases that are around for five years (and which are coming out more often than RHEL releases, so if you want the latest and greatest you’re not waiting as long), so there’s no benefit thereeither.

Proprietary software doesn’t get much of a benefit, either — installing Oracle on RedHat is just as much of a "genitals in the shredder" experience as installing it on Debian, and you won’t get any useful help from Oracle either (proprietary software support is near-universally worthless in my long and painful experience).

The only benefit to running CentOS is if you are more comfortable working in that environment and have your processes and tools tuned that way.


Source

http://serverfault.com/questions/53954/centos-vs-ubuntu

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