Need an advice. Debian vs CentOS
 

Hi. I used Debian for a long time. Currently I'm using Ubuntu, but I don't like it for some reasons. So I'm thinking about moving to Debian or CentOS. The first question is do you use CentOS not for server needs? What I use my linux for is basically programming and sometimes I have to install a lot of different libraries. Therefore a good package manager would be great. Recently I've had problems with apt (I have held broken packages). Of course, there might be my fault, but anyway I've heard that yum is a very good thing, sometimes better than apt. And what about hardware support for CentOS? There is a point that this system has stable, but old versions of packages and may not be able to support devices on modern laptops. What do you think about this stuff? Thanks much!

Both are available as Live CDs, so spend a few hours and take them both for a test drive on your hardware.

Since you won't tell us what you don't like about Ubuntu ("I don't like it for some reasons") it is impossible to say whether you will like Debian or CentOS better. They are both very different user interface than Ubuntu so that's a good start, maybe. ;)

Ubuntu loaded my cpu too much, even when there were no applications running. There are some other bugs and things that are simply uncomfortable for me. But what about using CentOS as a desktop? Is it mostly used and designed as a server system?

i'm not a developer or server maintainer or anything like that.
i have installed centos minimal edition (gnome2 only, very minimal and lightweight, 300MB iso) on an old laptop and liked it immediately.
well not immediately; i enabled some extra repos, there was a guide on distrowatch.
anyhow, it felt very sturdy from the beginning. reliable, install it, forget about it.
firefox ESR is the default, i like that a lot.
the laptops sole 1.6GHz processor handles the whole thing nicely, the system is "lightning fast and snappy", as they say.

i was never lucky with debian; debian based distros, yes, but not debian itself. pieces never fall together 100%. maybe it's just me.

Both Debian and CentOS can be used for: server, desktop, laptop, workstation, business, education, hobby, games, banking, medical, industrial, military, government, etc. :)

As you can see, I use CentOS on my desktop. Yes, you have to enable extra repositories to get a lot of programs (read the website instructions and set the priorities) but it's very, very reliable. Only use it with Gnome or KDE though: other desktops will leave you with missing configuration tools and various problems. And now that Red Hat is officially backing it, it can only get better. I don't have the latest hardware, but you don't often hear complaints. The programs may be tried and tested but the hardware support is kept up to date.

Debian has the advantage of a huge repository, although I've never found the package management as easy — that might just be that I'm a long-term Red Hat man, though. It too is very reliable, if you keep to the stable version. My chief gripe has always been that it's not easily configurable if you need to stray off the beaten track. For example, my USB speakers can be enabled in CentOS with 4 mouse-clicks; in Debian, I had to edit two files in /etc/modprobe.d/ and then reboot!

You can also see that I use Salix, on my laptop. That's basically Slackware with several hundred extra programs and various useful tools: Slackware for ordinary mortals rather than computer enthusiats. It's also one of the very few distros I know that works equally well whichever GUI you pick.

Debian VS cent

well cent is a bit more conservative
but yum is better than apt

but if you are going to be installing and removing all different kinds of librarys and headers ( rpm distros use "-devel ")

then installing cent on a vm might be a good idea
That way you can just use a back up image

there still are a lot of incompatible rpms's out there for CentOS 6 . It is NO WAY near as bad as it was for CentOS 5 , but it is still a issue

so install AND CONFIGURE "yum-priorites" plugin

CentOS, like PUIAS Springdale Linux and Scientific Linux is a RedHat clone. I am personally using Scientific Linux on a Dell laptop computer since 2012, using just the EPEL repository, and I have been
very satisfied with it: detecting printers in a network, connecting to WiFi or using a videprojector is extremely easy. Kernel and other security upgrades have never caused any trouble.
I believe that CentOS shouldbe about the same.
Concerning use, I have been mainly doing Fortran programming (with gfortran) and LaTeX with that computer.
One defect, which is inherited from RedHat, is that there are not many supported filesystems
besides ext4,vfat,iso9660 and ntfs. In particular, XFS is not available for 32-bit machines, and for JFS you need to install a kernel or modules from El Repo. This might be a problem if you have been using XFS or JFS on your Ubuntu machine.
With Debian, I have had some unpleasant experiences with the installer crashing the computer while probing for
a sound card, or being suddenly unable to upgrade any package. This was before 2010, so things may have improved since then. You might be better with Debian with respect to the variety of available filesystems.

As you are already comfortable with the Debian way, why not stick with Debian? Its very stable, reliable, and does not have the junk that Cannonicle has placed into Ubuntu to break Debian in it?

Again Ubuntu v Debian, no longer the same. You will always run into the possibility of broken libraries when you start mixing and matching libraries that were never designed to play nice together.

about 7 or 8 years ago apt was the far superior tool for package management. Today, its arguable for both Apt and Yum. Yum has come a LONG way in that time and is now very very powerful. You no longer require the rpm commands at all to install/remove packages. Still great for quarries and what not, but no longer required for installing/removing packages.

If you are not going to require anything bleeding edge and just want to play with the RPM way of life then check out CentOS on a live CD/DVD for a time and see how you like the change, if not, then I will tell you the same thing I tell anyone coming from Ubuntu. Stick with what you know and use Debian.

I'd say pretty much everyone else has hashed out most of the major points, but there's a few other topics worth mentioning.

• yum stores your transactions for packages you install or remove. This can be a very handy thing if you install a package only to find that it doesn't work right. All you have to do is undo the transaction instead of removing it and all of its dependencies. Apt doesn't store transactions, but it does have an autoremove function for orphaned packages. Yum has the package-cleanup command or the --remove-leaves option (which requires a plugin), but it doesn't seem to be as good. It should still be adequate though for your needs.
• Red Hat recently extended (and by extension, CentOS) support from 7 to 10 years, so CentOS is good if you need a set it and forget it setup. Debian by contrast seems to support a stable branch for approximately 3 years, depending on how long the freeze lasts. This can be good or bad depending on what you need.
• Red Hat will also backport certain packages for the first couple of years of the release. For instance, you'll notice that the kernel for CentOS 6 is 2.6.32. But it's really not. Security updates are applied to that branch as well as anything needed to support newer hardware. Debian does have a backports repository, but I don't know if the security team sends updates to it.

If you use Centos or Scientific you have to be very knowledgeable about repos and I would use the 'roll back' option on the packages.Is abiword supported yet by either of them?