

Ask HN: RHEL based or Debian based? - tesmar2

Over the years I have worked with both systems and I generally prefer RHEL based systems, mainly due to familiarity. HN, what are the pros/cons to working with either system?
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FireBeyond
I went for years as a RHEL/Centos guy, but over time I've become frustrated
with the age of packages supplied. I know there are "solutions", in the form
of the EPEL repository, RPMForge and the like, but in the end, they become a
stopgap, and lead to all manner of issues with dependencies.

I've recently grown pretty enamored with Ubuntu 12, and the ease of package
management. For me, the growing integration with LXC (which I love for the
benefit of "light" VMs / isolation) is becoming buttery smooth.

Support has always been a question, but in 8 years of experience with
approximately 50+ servers at multiple locations and clients, I've not once
needed to contact RedHat.

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csense
I agree. Sometimes you simply must have recent versions of certain packages,
and it's much likelier that you'll be able to do that out-of-the-box on
Debian/Ubuntu.

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ishbits
I also use CentOS on servers. It just feels more solid to me, but this is
probably more me than it. I also use Fedora on the desktop so I have a
consistent package management experience.

Even if I switched to Ubuntu/Debian on the desktop, I'd probably keep CentOS
on the servers. While its packages may be old, most things still compile on
it.

A long long time ago I took a preference to RedHat/Fedora (well, pre-Fedora)
as more software compiled by default on it than on Debian/Ubuntu.

I did once venture over to Ubuntu with the promise of clean upgrades from
release to release. In truth, it was no better than Fedora, and I found issues
hard to fix.

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noonespecial
I use Centos on servers. I've always found the Redhat model to be easier to
manage servers with. I use debian on embedded systems because it can more
easily be made read-only and smaller. Debian is more "Linux-y". Redhat makes
lots of changes to the kernel and filesystem layout that make tinkering with
the low level system harder.

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amalag
In my experience CentOS/Redhat is always a pain in the ass. I find
Ubuntu/Debian awesome primarily because of the package management.

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pestaa
I prefer Arch Linux, it's closest to FreeBSD in spirit but still running on
Linux kernel for compatibility reasons.

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rushabh
We just installed a new machine with the new Luna desktop from elementary os
[1]. Looks awesome so far. Might just tilt the balance in favour of Debian on
the desktop.

[1] <http://elementary.org>

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ishbits
The correct URL is: <http://elementaryos.org/>

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doug4hn
A quick search of Dice dot com reveals the following:

Red Hat - 991 RedHat - 769 CentOS - 383 RHEL - 350 Ubuntu - 250 Debian - 125

I love Ubuntu on my personal laptop, but RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora are what
I've used at work most.

