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Centos vs Debian: What are the differences?
What is Centos? The Community ENTerprise Operating System. The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code.
What is Debian? The Universal Operating System. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.
Centos and Debian can be primarily classified as "Operating Systems" tools.
According to the StackShare community, Debian has a broader approval, being mentioned in 387 company stacks & 390 developers stacks; compared to Centos, which is listed in 352 company stacks and 303 developer stacks.
Coming from a Debian-based Linux background, using the Ubuntu base image for my Docker containers was a natural choice. However, the overhead, even on the impressively-slimmed Hub images, was hard to justify. Seeking to create images that were "just right" in size, without unused packages or dependencies, I made the switch to Alpine.
Alpine's modified BusyBox has a surprising amount of functionality, and the package repository contains plenty of muslc-safe versions of commonly-used packages. It's been a valuable exercise in doing more with less, and, as Alpine is keen to point out, an image with fewer packages makes for a more sustainable environment with a smaller attack surface.
My only regret is that Alpine's documentation leaves a lot to be desired.
I have used libvirt in every Linux hypervisor deployment I do. I frequently deploy RHEL or CentOS hypervisor servers with libvirt as the VMM of choice. It's installable via the guided setup for EL-based Linux distros, it uses minimal resources and overhead, integrates seamlessly with KVM and Qemu, and provides powerful CLI for advanced users and experts looking for automated deployments, or via VirtManager in your favorite Linux desktop environment. Best used with Linux VMs, it allows KVM and QEMU direct hardware virtualization access.
Using Arch Linux for our systems and servers means getting the latest technology and fixes early, as well as early warnings for potential future breakage in other (slower) distributions. It's been easy to maintain, easy to automate, and most importantly: easy to debug.
While our software target is every recent Linux distribution, using Arch internally ensured that everyone understands the full system without any knowledge gaps.
Global familiarity, free, widely used, and as a debian distro feels more comfortable when rapidly switching between local macOS and remote command lines.
CentOS does boast quite a few security/stability improvements, however as a RHEL-based distro, differs quite significantly in the command line and suffers from slightly less frequent package updates. (Could be a good or bad thing depending on your use-case and if it is public facing)
Pros of CentOS
- Stable15
- Free to use8
- Reliable8
- Has epel packages5
- Good support5
- Great Community4
- I've moved from gentoo to centos2
Pros of Debian
- Massively supported51
- Stable47
- Reliable18
- Turnkey linux use it7
- Aptitude7
- Customizable6
- It is free6
- Works on all architectures4
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Cons of CentOS
- Yum is a horrible package manager1
Cons of Debian
- Old versions of software9
- Can be difficult to set up on vanilla Debian2