[mindcrime]

Whose choice? Not mine... not that I have anything in particular against Ubuntu (in fact, I'm on an Ubuntu system as I write this, because it's our corporate standard desktop here), but I still prefer Red Hat based distros, whether it's RHEL, CentOS, Fedora or what-have-you?

"Why?" you might ask. Well, TBH, a lot of it is just familiarity - I've been using RH based distros since the Red Hat 5.2 days, so it's what I know already. But more to the point, it just works. I haven't felt any pain using Fedora, CentOS and their ilk, that has ever compelled me to go looking for a different solution. And that's even more true for servers, where I don't care about prepackaged video codecs or sound or anything.

The one big thing that everyone has always touted as the edge that Debian/Ubuntu have over RH systems, is apt. But after having used Ubuntu for 2 years now, I still haven't found any regard in which is apt is particularly better than yum. Yeah, yum used to be dog slow, but that hasn't been a problem in ages. And I don't know about you, but it still annoys me that I need one command, yum, to both search for packages and install them on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora, but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu.

Anyway, props to the Ubuntu folks for the release. I do lean towards Red Hat derived distros, but I won't say that Ubuntu is bad or anything.

[jcastro]

> but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu.

apt 1.0 in Ubuntu now contains an `apt` binary, which means this is finally fixed! See also: http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/

[mindcrime]

Aah, well that's handy to know. It's always bugged me a bit, even though it's admittedly a minor nit.

[mwcampbell]

I think a big reason why Ubuntu is so popular for cloud deployments is that Canonical provides official Ubuntu images for Amazon EC2. Last time I checked, CentOS didn't. Red Hat does, but of course, you'll pay extra to run official RHEL, so that probably makes it less attractive to a lot of companies. Basically, Ubuntu is the path of least resistance on EC2.

My employer used RHEL on its servers (via a managed hosting service) for about a year, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because RHEL5 was still on Python 2.4, and I needed a newer Python for some things. Sure, I was able to install a newer Python in /opt/python2.5 and move on. But when we left the managed hosting service and it was time for me to choose the OS for our next servers, I went with Ubuntu, because I knew it would have newer software, including (by then) Python 2.6. Another factor, to be sure, is that I've been using Debian and Ubuntu sporadically since Debian 1.1 or 1.2 in 1996. So Ubuntu was quite comfortable for me. The same factors probably figure in other admins' decisions too.

No argument from me about yum versus apt; they both do the job. Actually, these days I think that Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) overreaches in some ways, with Debconf and automatic startup of services after installation, whereas the Red Hat distros leave configuration and service startup after initial installation to the admin. So there's no clear winner; they're just different.

[mindcrime]

I think there are CentOS official AMIs now. Not sure how long that's been the case, but their wiki suggests that such "official" images do exist.

http://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/AWS