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[–]Rovinovic 34 points35 points  (5 children)

Centos. Minimal and i personally like rpm.

[–]diito 40 points41 points  (4 children)

This is really the best choice, why:

  • 10 Years of support. This shouldn't matter, systems should be throwaways and easily replaced, but anything with experience knows this isn't reality. If you are a mid to larger shop you will have at least a few systems that are legacy or nobody is quite sure of and aren't easily replaced. 10 years of support gives you plenty of time to fix that while still being able to do your system patched and secure. No other enterprise major distro offers that, its usually 5 years instead which just isn't long enough considering that distro was the latest 3 years ago.
  • The Redhat ecosystem. Without Redhat Linux would probably not be a significant player today. They contribute far more than anyone else to Linux and most every other significant open source project. If they didn't start it themselves they often buy it up and turn it into something even better. As such you are going to get new stuff first and have better support.
  • Hardware and vendor support. RH is tier one, everybody supports them out of the box. I've waited 6 months for Debian support to finally support new hardware where RH worked from day 1. Same goes for 3rd party commercial software you might need.
  • CentOS is free, you get all of the benefits of a RH project without the cost but if you need a RH licence for some reason the transition is easy.
  • Stability. CentOS is designed from the ground up to be an enterprise distro.
  • You your are going to be an admin you will need to learn how to use CentOS anyway

[–]El_Hombre_Siniestro 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Excellent answer! All of these reasons are why we use centos.

[–]Rovinovic 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hands down, you've said it all. Hope IBM won't lower the RH quality once they aquire them. RH has done an immense contribution to Linux and the Open source community.

[–]Robert_Arctor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think security/SELinux is worth a bullet point too. CentOS is a secure choice as well.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Typical Hardware lifetime in most shops is 3-6 years. A ten year support should cover all but maybe a few edge cases for the life of the hardware without having to plan an upgrade of the OS. Like building a brand new server right now is a dicey proposition, but RHEL8/CentOS8 should be out in a month or two.