[marindez]

As someone who hasn't used CentOS much, when I've had to use it I've found the package selection (packages/versions) to be lacking, requiring me to use one of the countless 3rd party repos that may or may not contain what I need

[tehwalrus]

I've known people in authority positions who have insisted on CentOS because "red hat certification", "tested for enterprise" etc, whose first setup step is to enable EPEL and a bunch of 3rd party repos.

They don't seem to see how this negates the advantage of using a "well tested, enterprise grade" distro!

I much prefer Debian (for servers and development machines) as a good intersection between "up to date" and "stable".

[tormeh]

Well, epel has extra packages. They are by definition not essential to the functioning of the OS. Why you wouldn't want those from a rapidly updating or rolling-release repo is something I don't understand.

[tehwalrus]

EPEL not being enabled by default I find a little weird, but sure it's not the end of the world.

The thing I find strange is that the people I'm talking about will happily run code from random 3rd party repos (providing PHP 7.0 or similar), and copy/paste repo key fingerprints from the web without blinking, while steadfastly refusing to use an OS with such packages included and tested in the official repos "because security/quality/enterprise".

[lima]

Agreed on the third party repos, but EPEL is fine. Fedora/EPEL, while unsupported, is a Red Hat project. It's basically the upstream release for RHEL, and many Red Hat employees contribute. They have a really good QA process too.

[vbezhenar]

EPEL is a must. Also I'm using official nginx and postgres repositories for latest releases. Never used other repositories.

[jlgaddis]

If you want to run the latest, greatest, bleeding edge version of $foo, CentOS may not be for you.

[tooltalk]

Well, I noticed that CentOS/RHEL distro's have quite old versions of everything, but Debian stable doesn't seem all that cutting edge either. I find myself reaching out to backports and even sid to get what I need at times.

At my new job, we recently had that debate -- and I was quickly overruled for recommending CentOS/RHEL. My employer is a Java shop, I can almost always find rpm and deb pkg's for most stuff we need.

[rwmj]

RHEL works by backporting bug fixes and new features into the old versions. Don't go by the version numbers, check the availability of features instead.

[deadbunny]

Backporting features and not bumping versions is redicilous though, especially when that means v3.1 of upstream is different to v3.1 in your repo.

[pferde]

You're just not their target audience. Others are willing to throw money at Red Hat for this "rediculousness", though.

[rwmj]

RHT's market cap is over $20 billion today so that says it's providing real value to customers.

[jlgaddis]

FWIW, you can find newer versions of some software packages via "Software Collections".

[scbrg]

And neither is Debian (stable). But given that they're often used for the same purpose (servers), it's not that irrational to compare them. Having a larger, supported package selection (even if it's a bit old) may be a good thing, and relevant when you choose your distro.

For the record: I have no idea how the package selection compares between CentOS and Debian - I've been firmly in the Debian camp since forever, and stay there mostly for other reasons, of which laziness is the most important one.

[baruch]

It's not just the latest. Debian stable doesn't have the latest but it does have a larger selection of official packages.