I have a debian install that I've installed in 2001. It's clean, fully up to date and has never been reinstalled. It's not necessary. It had apache1 before, it had the old exim before, it had all kind of old packages and was gradually updated over the years. True, something like 'etckeeper' is a great boon these days.

Still, that's what I call a server distro ;-)

And yet, here I am running it on my laptop! :D

Debian is a great, stable distro. Even Sid, the unstable, rolling branch sees little breakage overall. Sane defaults, package maintainers who care about the minor rendering bugs in obscure packages and make the effort to patch said bugs. I'm continually impressed by the fit & finish of Debian, especially in context of how deep the Debian Archive is, with 68 thousand software packages in total.

Oh sure I also run it everywhere else -- sid on my workstation, 'testing' on my home server and laptop etc. It does cover pretty much all the bases!

But, the 'stable' server is rather amazing. I (used to) get into rpm-hell with centos/redhat in a matter of weeks. Even ubuntu will break stuff more often than not when crossgrading from 'major' versions.

I hadn't heard of etckeeper[0] before, thanks for the tip!

0 - https://etckeeper.branchable.com/

Same here! Just 2005/06 as i remember. And every time apt-get push new things to machine since i'm in "testing" build.

That's impressive.

I switched from CentOS to Debian on servers three years ago. I'd give two reasons:

1) No need for EPEL and similar extra repositories. Debian is extremely comprehensive.

2) Rolling updates. We keep some servers in the stable release, some in the testing release. No hiccups on upgrade, yet.

Servers you keep on the stable channel will go through the same kind of upgrades you see on major CentOS versions. I never had a CentOS upgrade go smoothly; We'd usually just reinstall everything from config management. When Debian 8 came out, we opted for a distro-upgrade and everything was perfectly smooth. It took longer to go through change management (cycle out of production, test, slowly reapply load) than it took to actually upgrade the servers.

The servers we keep on testing are non-critical, and go through much more frequent distro-upgrade cycles. We had a couple bumps on the road, during the sysv init to systemd transition, but overall I still classify the distro as extremely solid and much better than our previous experience with CentOS.

> I never had a CentOS upgrade go smoothly; We'd usually just reinstall everything from config management

AFAIK CentOS does not support distro-upgrades (eg. upgrading from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7)[1], we always end up making a fresh install whenever we want to upgrade, i've tried to use the UpgradeTool a few times but it didn't work (there was always something blocking the upgrade).

I believe this would be a point for Debian, the upgrade between releases just work :)

[1]https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CentOSUpgradeTool

Yeah, in-place upgrades between CentOS releases are not really supported, just as they are not really supported with RHEL.

However, this also comes with a perk. CentOS releases are generally the "current" release for at least three years, as opposed to two with Debian. Also, major releases are supported with critical security updates for years after they are no longer current. For example, CentOS 6 will still receive patches until November 2020.

Of course, whether this is important to you will vary based upon your needs. For some, the 2 year releases with an easy upgrade path between major releases will be the more important factor.

Having dealt with in the past RHEL 6 to 7 is supported but only for the server edition: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/637583. At a certain point I'm not sure what Debian does so much better, but that's just because I have not really needed to investigate it to the same depth as RHEL.

It will probably work for 7 -> 8, the upgrade tool is a recent addition. It already worked in RHEL for 6 -> 7.

That being said, for RHEL 6 -> 7 I did a clean reinstall due to the large architectural changes and it was the right decision.

> Debian is extremely comprehensive

Yes, Debian is comprehensive, but it comes at a price. Red Hat/CentOS are much better at maintaining the (fewer) packages they support and providing timely patches.

Bugs in less critical Debian packages sometimes linger for years.

That being said, Debian is a great server OS and the only one except CentOS that I'd recommend to anyone.

Can't really come up with any reason, if you're happy with CentOS you should probably keep using CentOS.

I just started out with Ubuntu but realised that Debian seems to have more control over their packages and have a much more stable ecosystem which I value. Also .deb packages always seem to be available for basically any software distributed for linux and why make life hard?

Good advice. I run OpenSUSE and couldn't be happier with my them in regards to Desktop and Server.

I think we all just just grok the way our distro does things.

Ubuntu is debian based, and works on .deb packages.

Just nitpicking, nothing else to add.

Yeah, if it didn't get wrecked every other upgrade, I'd probably still be on Ubuntu. But talking to the Ubuntu Washington people this past weekend, its still an ongoing problem. Comparatively, here I am running Stretch when I started with Wheezy years ago!

On the server the only upgrade issues I've had are things like apache configs breaking when moving from 2.2 to 2.4, or php (from 5 to 7), which happened when upgrading 14.04->16.04. Not sure how redhat/centos/etc would have prevented that.

Likewise a few of our custom system management packages need tweaking when new versions come out, but aside from that no problems with 1200+ servers.

Uhh, I'm talking about desktop Ubuntu, not server installs where you don't have pulse, xorg, a DE and a shedload of other software. Getting a server upgrade right shouldn't be too hard, but when you add on another thousand packages or so, it makes the upgrade process much more likely to have breakage.

I've had relatively smooth upgrades on 14.04+. Anything 12 and before has always been a bit tricky. 14 -> 16 I'd rather just reinstall since it leaves all the old upstart stuff laying around and can be confusing to troubleshoot.

Prevents PHP upgrade issues by not forcing that alongside the distro upgrade. Have php5 & php7 packages

True, but it needed to happen (and I think apache 2.4 was forced).

Generally it takes us about 12-18 months to get round to moving things on, and an OS upgrade is a great opportunity to kick us into a 'do it now' state.

Yea, on my desktop and laptops, I've completely switched over from Ubuntu to plain vanilla Debian and have been extremely pleased.

This is true! I wish to add that in my experience (years of use of both), I have found that Ubuntu is significantly lower quality and less stable than Debian. In other words, they squander some of the reliability they could inherit from Debian.

As someone who used Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS in (serious) production I agree 100%.

So many annoying bugs. Debian QA is much better, but Red Hat takes the cake. Their attention to even little details is remarkable.

As a regular user of both and a prolific runner of CentOS in production, I would err towards Debian these days. It just feels better to me. Things like hanging updates applying SELinux policies, the whole Python mess and the lag between RHEL and CentOS patches (this has improved I will say) etc just sort of put me off CentOS a bit. It's also a lot lighter.

Python is nicer in CentOS though. Software Collections are great:

https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/?search=python

We just use distro provided python versions on debian and virtualenvs. Don't touch anything else!

Probably right on the basis of the above however.

Batteries are included with Debian. I seem to always have to install things from EPEL (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3358), which has a lower standard for support. Debian seems to have everything I need in main that I need and I rarely have to go to non-free or contrib. This helps me trust my system more. Both security and stability.

When I switched around Red Hat 6 (not RHEL 6), the difference in quality of uninstall scripts and dependency management was stark: you can install and uninstall Debian packages without changes to your system. They test for this. If you need to tweak source, you can get build dependencies with one command, source with another, and build and install from your tweaked version with just one more.

The stable community...

It really does feel like Debian will be one of the only distros we have at the moment that will still be around in a hundred years.

* Debian pushes security fixes really fast (I remember a local root exploit being patch in less than a day in debian while I waited a few more days on CentOS)

* The general tooling is far better, lately, for example, I played with the tools used to build packages in clean chroots of each distributions: mock for CentOS, cowbuilder for Debian, cowbuilder is a lot more powerful, copy on right support, ability to build several packages in parallel, more switches in the cli arguments... mock is far more limited even if it does the job. Also I love reportbug, even if it seems antiquated at first (bug tracker based on emails, wtf!?), it's really really really convenient as it automatically grabs the information regarding the buggy package (logs, version, dependencies version...) and let you simply review it.

* Debian as more packages available, even compared to CentOS+Epel

* Debian as backports if you really need newer versions of a package

* If you want/need to be on the bleeding edge, sid (or unstable) is a great rolling release.

* Debian does a better job at maintaining stable version of a given software (I remember a few years ago, CentOS/RHEL updated OpenLDAP server to the latest version, which broke my directory on my (dev, fortunately) infrastructure due to a change in configuration format, this never happened to me on Debian).

* If you have relatively clean upstream, packaging is nearly automatic on Debian thanks to all the dh_<helpers>

* at least until CentOS 6, yum was a slow and fragile beast IMHO, apt being more robust and less susceptible to corrupt its DB in case of crash or interruptions. It seems to have gotten better with CentOS 7 however and I never played with dnf.

On the minus side compared to CentOS:

* kickstart is a dream to use compared to preseed which is quite horrible, specially if you are trying to template it.

* The life span of a CentOS/RHEL is really long, +10 years for latest releases, which can be great for long, complex and slow projects, Debian in contrast is more on an EOL after ~5 years policy.

Debian policy.

Package selection and packaging quality. The Debian aarchive is about 10x the size of CentOS / RHEL: 60k+ packages vs about 7k or so, as of a few years ago. I've not done a recent RHEL count.

1) One reason would be that increasingly often, when you search for some rhel/centos problem, the solution is behind a paywall at access.redhat.com. Not that I blame RH, they are a commercial company and need to make money somehow. Or similarly, you get a search hit for bugzilla.redhat.com, but it turns out that the bug has been marked customers only, so you can't access it unless you have a RHEL subscription.

2) For major and minor releases, they are months behind RH. That may or may not be a problem for you, though.

3) Debian is less beholden to the interests of any one corporate entity (for better or worse), if that kind of thing appeals to you.

4) Debian has a huge number of packages, much more than CentOS + EPEL.

5) On the fly upgrade to the next release. Though in a professional setting where you have automated provisioning, reinstall isn't that much of a burden anyway.

That being said, both CentOS and Debian are very solid distros, you're not going wrong if you choose one of them.

As someone who hasn't used CentOS much, when I've had to use it I've found the package selection (packages/versions) to be lacking, requiring me to use one of the countless 3rd party repos that may or may not contain what I need

I've known people in authority positions who have insisted on CentOS because "red hat certification", "tested for enterprise" etc, whose first setup step is to enable EPEL and a bunch of 3rd party repos.

They don't seem to see how this negates the advantage of using a "well tested, enterprise grade" distro!

I much prefer Debian (for servers and development machines) as a good intersection between "up to date" and "stable".

Well, epel has extra packages. They are by definition not essential to the functioning of the OS. Why you wouldn't want those from a rapidly updating or rolling-release repo is something I don't understand.

EPEL not being enabled by default I find a little weird, but sure it's not the end of the world.

The thing I find strange is that the people I'm talking about will happily run code from random 3rd party repos (providing PHP 7.0 or similar), and copy/paste repo key fingerprints from the web without blinking, while steadfastly refusing to use an OS with such packages included and tested in the official repos "because security/quality/enterprise".

Agreed on the third party repos, but EPEL is fine. Fedora/EPEL, while unsupported, is a Red Hat project. It's basically the upstream release for RHEL, and many Red Hat employees contribute. They have a really good QA process too.

EPEL is a must. Also I'm using official nginx and postgres repositories for latest releases. Never used other repositories.

If you want to run the latest, greatest, bleeding edge version of $foo, CentOS may not be for you.

Well, I noticed that CentOS/RHEL distro's have quite old versions of everything, but Debian stable doesn't seem all that cutting edge either. I find myself reaching out to backports and even sid to get what I need at times.

At my new job, we recently had that debate -- and I was quickly overruled for recommending CentOS/RHEL. My employer is a Java shop, I can almost always find rpm and deb pkg's for most stuff we need.

RHEL works by backporting bug fixes and new features into the old versions. Don't go by the version numbers, check the availability of features instead.

Backporting features and not bumping versions is redicilous though, especially when that means v3.1 of upstream is different to v3.1 in your repo.

You're just not their target audience. Others are willing to throw money at Red Hat for this "rediculousness", though.

RHT's market cap is over $20 billion today so that says it's providing real value to customers.

FWIW, you can find newer versions of some software packages via "Software Collections".

And neither is Debian (stable). But given that they're often used for the same purpose (servers), it's not that irrational to compare them. Having a larger, supported package selection (even if it's a bit old) may be a good thing, and relevant when you choose your distro.

For the record: I have no idea how the package selection compares between CentOS and Debian - I've been firmly in the Debian camp since forever, and stay there mostly for other reasons, of which laziness is the most important one.

It's not just the latest. Debian stable doesn't have the latest but it does have a larger selection of official packages.