[CentOS] Redhat vs centos vs ubuntu

Thu Nov 10 18:50:14 UTC 2011
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:16:18 PM Craig White wrote:
> I would generally agree with this (brevity is not your strongest trait)

That would be correct.  As Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."  And I type (and read) relatively quickly....

But on-topic, hopefully, I would say that there are more similarities between CentOS and Debian Stable than between Ubuntu LTS and CentOS, primarily due to the way security and version upgrades are handled in terms of process, but that's my opinion because my use cases are better served by the CentOS way of doing things, at least for now.

And I would add Scientific Linux to the comparison mix partially due to the difference from CentOS in the way SL handles security-only updates even for older point releases.  To see a very clear example of SL's way of doing it, please look at the timestamps of the packages in:
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/50/x86_64/updates/security/
which is the security updates directory for SL 5.0.  Yes, .0, not .7.  

There is no perfect Linux distribution, and there never can be, since there are so many differences in the ways users want to use their systems.