
Ask HN: Debian as alternative to RHEL/CentOS/Fedora what would you miss? - reacharavindh
In light of IBM&#x27;s involvement and the price tag on RH. The days of IBM enterprise Linux with a hefty price tag and crippled community editions is not that far.<p>As a HPC admin, we have been standardising on CentOS for a good while and are nervous about this development. Would Debian be the savior and become the beacon of &quot;Open Linux&quot;? What would you miss or gain by moving to the Debian world?
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snazz
Most of the new technologies from the RH side work on Debian (systemd,
SELinux, udev, dbus, PulseAudio) or are now the default. You would get a newer
kernel (3.10 —> 4.4) and software, as well as a larger repository.

More importantly, though, there are no corporate sponsors for Debian.
Canonical supports Ubuntu, but not Debian. If that matters, you’d need to look
elsewhere.

Your needs for HPC are probably different from the norm, though, so maybe none
of this matters. The biggest thing is that the gap between Red Hat and the
rest of the Linux world is closing and every distro is becoming more similar
to what you’re used to.

