Whats is better and why? Linux CentoS or Ubuntu?

Should be mentioned that CentOs is no longer the “preferred distribution in the hosting industry” and has not been for a long time. That is simply a fake status, CentOS users would like to keep, but the reaility is one very different. Not even in VPS, Dedicated Servers or even Clouds. This also includes Red Hat in those different areas (Simple Hosting, VPS, Dedicated & Clouds). I will leave the following links for anyone to do their own checks but overall, Ubuntu covers well above the “preferred” term for all of this areas. So if you are looking for something that is applied in the industry, on the desktop, in the production stage but also in the development stage. If you are looking for something that is up to speed with latest technologies, openstack, deployment, and more, then please, one quick research for this will reveal Ubuntu above all others. In any case, I will leave the following for others to see and check for themselves.

Sources you can check out are as follow. I will also put the top 5 as of this writing where it applies:

W3TECHS - https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all Ubuntu - 34.1% Debian - 31.4% CentOS - 20.6% Red Hat - 3.7% Gentoo - 2.7%

W3COOK - http://www.w3cook.com/os/ubuntu Ubuntu - 29.9% CentOS - 24.57% Debian - 11.31% Fedora - 0.68% Red Hat - 0.01%

THE CLOUD MARKET - http://thecloudmarket.com/stats Ubuntu - 57.5% Windows - 7.8% Red Hat - 4.8% CentOS - 3.7% Fedora 1.4%

OPENSTACK - http://www.openstack.org/assets/survey/April-2016-User-Survey-Report.pdf (Page 47) Ubuntu - 55% (With an potential growth of up to 19%) CentOS - 20% (With an potential growth of up to 7%) Red Hat - 16% (With an potential growth of up to 4%) SUSE - 2% (With an potential growth of up to 1%) Debian - 3% (With an potential growth of up to 0%)

Even sources like Steam prove the amount of users compared to other distros that Ubuntu has, with 30% of all Linux users on Steam, followed by 9% which is a mix of other different distros.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

Lastly the Linux Tendency over times shown here, clearly say what will happen in the following years:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux/all/y

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 12-m&q=%2Fm%2F03x5qm,%2Fm%2F03x_8t,%2Fm%2F02prjf

i prefer ubuntu(easy) than RHEL.

i am not blindly supporting. i had my past experience.

we used RHEL 5/6 series. we are web developers with ROR,postgresql,hadoop,golang(REST-API),angular2-dart,selenium,etc. we were using puppet(server-agent) , chef(master-node-workstation) to replicate the infrastructure, we used rvm/rbenv to install ruby VM. but we have some issues with yum/rpm with RHEL.

for examples if we want to install latest rubies like 2.3.0 , it is little complex in RHEL. because few c/c++ libraries will give dependencies issues like libyaml-x86-64,libyaml-i386,etc. similarly we have many issues while updating packages to latest. installing/uninstalling in RHEL is little headache . we have more than 40 servers so we have to use puppet/chef. there are many opensource puppet modules and chef cookbooks for ubuntu than RHEL.

recently we are migrated to ubuntu-14.04, which seems more stable release than the earlier. it is very easy for us to code install/uninstall instruction for puppet/chef/Dockerfile,etc. because apt source code repositories contains latest libraries. apt package manager resolve many dependencies by itself, handling mismatch versions. with apt you can easily uninstall/remove pkgs.

apt repositories has latest source code for many of the open source technologies like ruby,rails,postgresql,golang, selenium,angular2-dart etc

recently we are moving to micro services, kubernetes,docker swarm, where we must have to use containers .we have to write many Dockerfile/s. ubuntu is very suitable to work with Dockerfile/s docker containers, etc. here again i prefer ubuntu than RHEL.

I use Ubuntu at home for my own servers (about 7 years working with Ubuntu and other Debian based systems) and in work we use CentOS (about 4 years on and off with CentOS).

My go to would be Ubuntu if you want to set something up, play around for it for a while then maybe close it down, without having to worry about getting everything up and running.

Like said before, Ubuntu has more up to date repos, and I for one would prefer that, but if I was setting up a server I know will be used long term (like the ones I set up in work) I would use CentOS without question, its repos are based more on stability and security and if you really want more fancy stuff EPEL is your best friend!