On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Christopher Chan <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote: > On Saturday, May 14, 2011 01:30 AM, Craig White wrote: > >> CentOS has always been a take it or leave it proposition and thus nothing has really changed >> except that many businesses have become reliant upon it and I see my company and many >> other companies turning to Ubuntu not just because of the slow turnaround by CentOS but >> upstream's long window between releases. Surely anyone who is supporting Ruby on Rails >> (or PHP prior to the PHP 5.3 update in the 5.6 update) understands the issue. > > You want to go Ubuntu 'LTS'? Be my guest. Yeah, they have a lot more > packages by default but don't expect any backports or what not for their > crap. There are advantages and disadvantages to installing the latest Ubuntu (or Fedora) on the desktop rather than CentOS, but Ubuntu's not crap on the server-side. You have an X-less Debian testing install with plymouth and upstart; "testing" might not inspire you with confidence but it's proven to be very stable up to now. They freeze Debian imports four months before release so they have enough time to stabilize the release. Ubuntu does have backports (I've never used them though). For example, for the current LTS: http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid-backports/ My clients who switch from CentOS (I was supporting almost 100% CentOS a few years ago but the Debian and Ubuntu share - especially Ubuntu - is growing quickly) do so because it's "in vogue" (my interpretation) and because the packages are more recent than CentOS's. They often don't even care about LTS!