[hackcrafter]

I understand why CentOS/RHEL is preferred by some server admins to Ubuntu (longer support cycles, hardware drivers etc), but I never got why individual devs run CentOS versus Ubuntu on their own machines.

Every time I have tried to get tech stacks up and running on CentOS, there is just more friction/pain than doing the equivalent with Ubuntu LTS.

Am I missing something?

[krapht]

I mean, you said it yourself. I run a CentOS development machine because what I write will eventually deploy on a CentOS / RHEL server.

[Veratyr]

For me it's pretty much all package management:

- I like that all the packaging stuff is done by a single command (yum, or more recently dnf).

- I find RHEL derivatives' packaging conventions easier to deal with than Debian derivatives' (<thing>, <thing>-dev, lib<thing> etc. isn't always consistent on Debian derivatives).

- EPEL gives me most of the packages I need and I don't have issues with them being dated as often as Ubuntu LTS.

- RHEL derivatives' don't tend to do weird nonsense like messing with nginx configuration layout to match Apache.

[Aloha]

Because odds are, you'll need to deploy onto CentOS if you sell your product to someone else.

[Avshalom]

Also, I like yum's cli more than apt-get's (less than pacman's though)

[pekk]

Group #2 (users/desktop users/developers) runs CentOS because of Group #1 (server admins/agencies). I'm sure you could find some if you looked, but I've never met anyone except RH employees who actively preferred CentOS/RHEL for personal usage.

[jstewartmobile]

If you're deploying to physical hardware, most enterprise-y drivers and tools are only provided in RPM format by the vendors.

That, and I've had much better luck with RedHat on bare metal than any other distro.

Personally, I like Debian-based distros, but for physical hardware, RedHat is where it's at.

[epalmer]

I created and deployed a vagrant centos 6.8 development environment for our dev team because we are developing for RHEL 6.8. It was not very hard to do.

[planteen]

RHEL is comparable to running LTS Ubuntu. If you want bleeding edge latest, that's what Fedora is for, not RHEL.

[vacri]

Network effects and legacy. Redhat was around long before Ubuntu, and they have a lot of inertia.